


and there are some night I wait for someone to save us (because none of this was ever real but no one told you so)

by angelica_barnes



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Amnesia, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Depression, Homophobia, Lots of it, More angst, Multi, and on top of that there's more angst, if you can think of something that involves pain and suffering then it's probably in here, oh and there's suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-24 02:33:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 34,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14945957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelica_barnes/pseuds/angelica_barnes
Summary: what could've been.(A.K.A. the winter soldier kills steve rogers, natasha and clint killed each other, thor and loki respectively die fighting the other (and i mean, like, they stay dead, not whatever loki does to come back all the damn time), vision turned out evil, etc.)basically pain, pain, pain, death and more death with sprinkles of depression on top and to top it all off, a cherry of happy endings that i promise are actually happy and not like "oh they both died at least they're together now".





	and there are some night I wait for someone to save us (because none of this was ever real but no one told you so)

**Author's Note:**

> first half of title taken from "Some Nights (Intro)" by fun.
> 
> this fic was completely based off its lyrics.
> 
> all other songs you can copy and paste the lyrics to search for them because I used 74 of them and I don't think there's space to list them all so

 

 

 

******1.**

_ and she held on to all she had left of him, oh, and what could’ve been. _

 

He tells Peggy he loves her and then Howard his coordinates, and everything goes black. He’s never been more scared in his life, but then he blinks.

It feels like it’s been five seconds, but has actually been five weeks; Peggy throws her arms around him and two months later, there’s a ring on her finger and a year after that, a dark-eyed baby and Steve Rogers goes on to live the all-American dream Bucky Barnes always wanted for him.

In later years, when he’s seventy-six and his daughter’s all grown up and Peggy’s passed away, a new assassin called the Winter Soldier is caught and put to death.

Supposedly, his name is James Buchanan Barnes, and Steve is asked how he feels about his best friend, Bucky, showing up alive and brainwashed and then dying for his crimes.

Steve asks, “Who the hell is Bucky?”

 

_ he’s not coming home. _

**2.**

_ but I’m dating a semi-sadist. so I’ve got a black eye. _

 

Tony Stark proposes to Pepper Potts on May 8, 2011, only 3 years after they start dating. The media hates their relationship, calls them hopeless, because who would want to date someone as fucked-up as Tony Stark?

And they’re not. Pepper loves him, loves him with all of her heart and soul, and he’s given her both of those things. There’s always something in the back of his mind that’s nagging him, something he feels is missing, but he can never quite grasp exactly what it is and so he’s happy, happy as can be with Pepper.

As they seal their union with a kiss, across the world, a gunshot is heard as Bruce Banner ends his own life.

 

_ I dream we’ll go somewhere that’s green. _ ****

 

**3.**

_ there’s nothing I can see, darkness becomes me. _

 

It is a lousy photo.

_ Natalia Romanova _ , they said, and now he’s here in an alleyway, waiting for her to appear. He hears the tell-tale clicking of heels and readies to pounce, only to find her wicked grin pressed against his and her talon-like nails slashing his neck.

He buries his arrow in her stomach and they bleed out together, to the sound of static from his com and her breathless pants as she kisses him, desperate to feel something,  _ anything _ before she collapses, lifeless, to the asphalt.

 

_ but I’m already dead. _ ****

 

**4.**

_ I had a dream that I could fly from the highest tree. _

 

“Riley!” Sam screams, and dives down to catch his lover before he can well and truly hit the ground. “Riley. It’s gonna be okay.”

God, two seconds in and he’s already saying prayers and telling lies; he’s so far gone and Riley doesn’t have much time now. Sam leans down and kisses him, this gasping man he loves so much, and Riley clings to him with the last of his strength.

“Get outta here, Sam,” Riley croaks, coughing blood. “Finish the mission.”

“No, not without you.” Taking a page from Captain America’s book; if Bucky Barnes could die for his best friend, then Sam would too. “Never.”

Riley just closes his eyes. Sam does also, blocking out everything but Riley’s soft whimpers, and whispers, “I love you,” as the grenade is thrown and the blast kills them both, painlessly.

 

_ I don’t know what’s left to say about this life I’m willing to leave. I lived it full and I lived it well, there’s many tales I’ve lived to tell. _

 

**5.**

_ and I could try to run but it would be useless. you’re to blame. just one hit of you, I knew I’d never ever ever be the same. _

 

After the war, Howard Stark and Peggy Carter marry each other to try and conceal their broken hearts, both so expertly severed by one Steve Rogers as he sacrificed himself for the world.

But now, as they stare at each other with slight smiles, Peggy takes her husband’s hand and they agree then that this love child, this “mistake” some say as created from their bad days, will be raised to the best of their ability.

And the young Anthony Stark, their little Tony, is so perfectly beautiful and kind and curious, and Howard teaches his son all he knows, and Peggy carves into her son’s heart a most beautiful algorithm, the answer to life : love.

And they teach him about the man they both adored, and Tony idolizes Captain America from the very beginning.

Until, one day, when he’s sixteen, his mother starts to stare blankly off into space and his father becomes rough and tired from fame and hours of endless calls, and the day he is first hit by Howard, the man he loves most in this fragile, transparent world, Tony runs to his mother.

But instead of opening her arms and telling him it’ll all be alright, she screeches at his touch and breaks his favorite cup, “Who are you?!”

“Your son,” he pleads, “your son.”

“I have no son,” she whispers, and he crumples to the floor and cries into an emptied bottle of vodka, to forget it all himself.

 

_ something must’ve gone wrong in my brain. _

 

**6.**

_ I’d do anything for you, but you won’t do the same. _

 

They are only children, and children can be expected to make mistakes. Especially when angry, especially when vulnerable. Cold and indifferent, with nothing to care for but each other, and yet that alone can be fatal.

And so HYDRA beats it out of them.

Wanda no longer recognizes her brother, his snowy hair and icy eyes, as he does not warm at the sight of her anymore. And Pietro can see no one but an angry witch with eyes the color of flickering flames.

But then, children can be spontaneous, unpredictable, and so Wanda strikes out in fury from an argument and a high officer takes the blow, one they have known for a very long time, and the guards all come for her, and Pietro holds his broken sister in his arms.

“Who did it?” They growl, and he feels something twinge in his chest, and places his hand over it. Blinks, hardens, and stands straight up and looks them in the eyes.

“I did,” and he is killed in the most tortured way one can be while Wanda screams his name and becomes no longer broken, but shattered.

A year later and she shatters those known as the Avengers, and the world bends to HYDRA’s will in fear of their fiery scarlet witch.

 

_ oh, you’d watch me burn down in flames. _

 

**7.**

_ make him a list of what is wrong, the things you’ve told him all along, and pray to god he hears you. _

 

War is a messy, complicated, nuanced thing.

Sometimes, in war, you must kill or be killed. Sometimes, in war, you must betray or be betrayed. Sometimes, in war, you must try or be tried.

But now, in this war as old as time, Thor learns one final price of this shed blood for righteous reason.

Sometimes, in war, you must undo or be undone.

Except now, he is both! He laughs at the irony, but nothing is funny at all, and he chokes on his tears as they overwhelm him, drowning Thor in his own grief, and he gently lifts his brother’s lifeless body and cradles it close to his chest.

“I am sorry, brother,” he croaks, voice thick and breaking, and he presses a last kiss to his love’s lips, those cold, unforgiving blue lips that will spit venomous insults at him no longer. “I am sorry.”

The burns covering Loki’s body are in the shapes of lighting, long zigzags, and the hammer sits in the hole it’s made in the prince’s abdomen, and Asgard watches as its new king crumbles into nothing but a scared little boy, too wracked with sadness to even function, as he feels his loss sparking through every vein, every bone, every muscle in his body, and his people grieve with him, though they can never understand.

Thor was mistaken. It is not that you must undo or be undone, in war, sometimes.

It is that sometimes, in war, you must undo and accept that you will be undone.

 

_ and he goes left, and you stay right. between the lines of fear and blame, you begin to wonder why you came. _ ****

 

**8.**

_ I gave you the world and you threw it away. leaving these broken pieces behind you. everything wasted, nothing to say. _

 

He never thought someone as amazing as the Black Widow would ever love him. But here she is, telling him she adores him and kissing him, and god, he hasn’t been kissed in… ever, actually, never has he ever been kissed.

But then, she pushes him, and he knows who she needs, but now, he’s losing it, he’s losing it, he’s being pushed out of his own head -

He crushes this tiny woman in his large fists like it’s nothing, and that’s when Clint shows up, just to check if his best friend is okay.

But instead of a doctor and a spider, he finds a monster cradling a dead woman, green seeping from his bones and skin and his eyes are dark, now, dark with the grief that comes with the guilt of killing any and every one you’ve ever loved, and soon Bruce is cradling a lifeless Natasha Romanoff in his arms.

He looks up at the broken Hawkeye, “I’m so sorry,” and his voice is barely a whisper. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean to.”

But that means nothing to the only person who has perhaps ever loved Natasha more than he did, and so Clint screams his agony, “YOU MONSTER!”

His hands are around Bruce’s throat before the doctor can even blink, and the world turns black on Natasha’s red hair and green eyes, but Bruce feels no pain.

A freshly born monster collapses on top of the one he’s just murdered in the name of love.

 

_ because when the villain falls, the kingdoms never weep. so, don’t tell me that I didn’t get it right! don’t say it wasn’t true, that you were not the monster that I knew. _ _ _

 

**9.**

_ and I can’t make your heart feel something it won’t. _

 

After the war is over, and Bucky falls asleep with pain shuttering behind those beautiful blue orbs, Steve returns home to Brooklyn, where Sharon finds him.

It’s not his fault he falls for her so instantly. She’s so much like Peggy, with the same no-bullshit attitude and fierce loyalty, and she loves him right back, which only makes it better. He wastes no time in asking her to marry him, and she spends no more than a second mulling it over.

They have no children, are simply content in their love, and they each work again and again to save the world in their own way, but always return home to each other at the end of the day.

Across the world, Bucky is woken up from cryo and left alone with T’Challa, the only one he trusts there, and asks what’s happened while he’s been out.

T’Challa is married to a woman named Nakia, it seems, and Steve has settled down with that girl, Sharon, the one Bucky saw his best friend kissing right before the shit hit the fan, and he’s silent as the king tells him this, staring down at his hands.

“Is there anything else I can assist you with, Sergeant Barnes?” T’Challa asks kindly, when he’s finished catching Bucky up, and once again, the man looks up with heartbroken eyes.

His voice wavers but there is no doubt in his request.

“Make me forget.”

They do.

(The man that comes out of it is not any less broken, but his appearance does break Steve Rogers.)

 

_ I can’t make you love me if you don’t. _ _ _

 

**10.**

_ without a care, I was out of touch. but it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough. I just knew too much. _

 

The Avengers are aware of the casualties they cause, the lives they ruin, the homes they destroy, as much as everything they’ve saved, if not more so. There’s a reason there are nightmares, that sometimes one of them bursts into random tears for seemingly no reason, that they all drink together on Sundays, that they live in fear of themselves.

But nothing can compare to the guilt of murdering your own child.

However indirectly.

They knew about Peter Parker, they all did. But they never knew what he could do, that he’s a headstrong little shit like Steve Rogers with the brains of Tony Stark and the compassion of Bruce Banner somehow mixed with the strength of Thor, but none of those combine well and now they pick up Spider-Man’s body and carry it home, to Avengers Tower.

When Merida sees her boyfriend, lifeless in their arms, she screeches and shatters all the windows, the shards raining down on the city and killing about fifty people, but she can pay no attention to anyone but the dead boy her parents are handing to her.

And Natasha and Clint do everything they can to make up for it. They shower her with affection, and time, and praise and gifts and everything she could ever want, but now she is only blank. They know something’s wrong with her, what’s wrong with her; she’s too shocked and still with grief to even properly mourn.

But they never would’ve thought this would happen. Let alone to their sweet, carefree, stubborn baby girl.

An empty vial in her hand and her hair covering her face, her limbs splayed out, her chest still…

Natasha is the one who screams, this time, and Clint breaks down sobbing over the body of their daughter, their only child, and the Avengers seem to come apart at the seams at the loss of all their minds.

In another room, due to Tony’s science and Wanda’s magic, Peter Parker wakes up in Merida’s bed.

 

_ ha, ha, ha, bless your soul. you really think you’re in control? well, I think you’re crazy. just like me. _

 

 

**11.**

_ once there was a way to get back homeward. once there was a way to get back home. _

 

He was only curious enough to wonder what might happen, to try and experiment so he could really see what would happen.

His skin turns tan from red, his eyes brown from yellow, his hair sprouts blonde and thick. Wanda rushes over to him, taking his face in her hands, and he smiles at her.

He’s human now, like her, can’t she see? Isn’t she happy?

But no, she’s yelling something at him, crying, and her red wisps are dancing about his body, trying to… heal him, it seems.

His skin is wrinkled, and then grey, and he watches as his hands become bone and then he can see no more as his eyes disintegrate and he crumbles to the floor, only a pile of dust, and Wanda screams for her Vision but he can hear nothing; his ears are long gone with his body.

His witch carries the urn with her everywhere, and for a few days tries to perish herself, but his friends do not let her.

The inventor tries to replicate him. Make another AI, fix the mistake, make the girl feel better again.

Instead she lets out a violent sob and they see the red too late, and their scarlet witch has scarlet blood on her hands as they all vanish into dust, just like him.

And they are haunted, just like him.

 

_ and I will sing a lullaby. _ _ _

 

**12.**

_ all I know is, darling, I was made for loving you. _

 

From the beginning, Sam has known blue eyes. They were the first arms that held him, and then the first legs he walked on, and the first wings with which he flew.

“My name is Maddy,” the angel tells him when Sam is fifteen, and Sam smiles and hugs him close, combing his fingers through the soft feathers of the angel’s wings. Maddy takes a moment, stock still with surprise, but hugs him back.

It’s dangerous.

Maddy’s young blue eyes are bright with mirth, but over the next three years, they start to wither; his wings turn grey and his smiles tired, and when Sam asks why, Maddy simply kisses him and tells Sam he loves him.

Sam stops questioning it, until a year later when another angel comes in through the window and grabs Maddy’s wrist.

“You have broken the first rule of the angels,” the older angel hisses, and Sam reaches out and pulls Maddy back into his arms.

“Don’t touch him.” He stares the angel down, who seems to be overcome with disgust, and yet sympathy, somehow.

“You have fallen in love with a human!”

Maddy just buries his face in Sam’s chest, and the other angel sighs, “You know the punishment for this, Madison.”

Maddy starts to cry, but to no avail, and  Sam is forced to watch as his angel’s wings fully blacken and those blue, blue eyes turn to pale white film.

“Maddy,” he whispers, but the creature looking at him now does not know that name.

 

_ please, don’t go. _ _ _

 

**13.**

_ funny, you’re the broken one, but I’m the only one who needed saving. _

 

She does not want to talk to the man who killed her brother.

Well, Clint did not kill Pietro, technically. Instead, Pietro killed himself, put himself in the path of all those bullets, just so that this man they hardly knew could live. But still, she can’t help but resent the Hawkeye for living.

So when she collapses in her grief, onto the asphalt and screaming as the rubble rumbles and the ground shakes as it rises higher and the red wisps from her fingertips murder everything within ten miles, she feels no regret. No guilt. No remorse.

Simply rage.

And hence, she sets out to kill Ultron as her home begins to touch the clouds, and when she finds him, she wills herself to give him mercy.

No urge to do so comes.

He is dead within seconds, but she does not feel fulfilled; as the ship flies off, the one with all the living and the heroes who have now retreated, she faces her palm towards the ground and grits her teeth.

All the life drains out of her with the force of the blast, and what once was Sokovia becomes a steaming pile of ash in a crater, as a million eyes watch skeletons become unearthed and their homes crumble.

In the midst of it all, a dead scarlet girl, staring blankly up at the grey sky.

 

_ I want you to stay. _ _ _

 

**14.**

_ I’ll color me blue. anything it takes to make you stay. _

 

Ultron is not a monster, he believes. He is simply, how you say, a visionary. He sees the world as it could be - better.

So that, truly, is why he does not want to kill Natalia Romanova.

It would be too messy. Too unplanned. Would cause too much trouble with the Barton boy, but Ultron supposes he could work around all that - he needs to defeat the Avengers for his perfect world to be a reality, after all. He can’t have scum like Steve Rogers causing rebellion and alleyway fights in his new kingdom.

He tells the spitting woman this, but she only hisses a threat towards him and turns away.

He does not like to be threatened. It means his new earth could be in danger. And he is not human, he is simply a computer with a humanoid body; he does not have the ability to recognize humor.

And so, he blasts a hole through her abdomen to obliterate the flaw in the system, not expecting her to choke out the Barton boy’s name, “Clint.”

It seems he has not disabled her com.

She collapses, dead, onto the pavement, and Ultron waits in silence. Soon enough, Hawkeye bursts through the door, charging at him with a rage Ultron has seen unparalleled; he orders Wanda to make the Barton boy forget.

Instead, she tears out Ultron’s heart and the last thing he sees is a broken man crouched on the floor, holding a red-haired woman as he’s cradled in a red witch’s arms himself.

 

_ love is hard, I know. _

 

**15.**

_ now tell me, how did all my dreams turn to nightmares? how did I lose it when I was right there? tell me why the world never fights fair. _

 

The ache in his chest for Steve is only background noise, now. It’s been there all his life, before the war, before the serum, before Peggy, and has also been there for just as long the numbness that comes with blocking out every single emotion you ever have.

At least HYDRA has taught him something useful.

He does not, however, understand his want for the black falcon, Sam. He is insufferable, stubborn, but gentle, kind, and yet hates Bucky with everything he can muster, and he is Steve’s husband. It seems people move on quicker and Bucky would sometimes like to admit.

Not from him, of course, from Peggy. Steve has never loved Bucky, and Bucky will never tell Steve the truth.

He will, however, consider telling Sam.

While Steve talks to Sharon, makes small comments about the weather and remains oblivious to the blush on the girl’s face, Bucky decides to risk, “Can you tell me how you guys met?”

Sam turns and stares at him, eyes boring a hole on Bucky’s head as he looks him up and down, and Bucky can feel Sam’s judgement, rather, the harsh reality that he is something that needs to be judged. But Sam’s eyes stop at the sight of Maria cradled in Bucky’s arms, and so he sighs.

“Went running every morning in D.C., same route, same time, always. Steve started following the same path I did, though he was much faster, and soon enough we got to talking. One thing led to another and now here we are.”

Bucky swallows and looks down at his daughter, snoring softly, and musters a  small smile. “You make him very happy.”

Sam seems taken aback by the simple state of a fact, and his tone suggests he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. “... Thanks.”

Bucky just looks up and smiles wider. It pains him, but he can live with this, the new dull ache that comes with the two men he loves loving each other, so long as they’re both happy and he has his детка. (baby)

“You’re welcome,” he says, and then Steve gets back in the car and Sam starts bickering with him over the driver’s seat and the stereo and Bucky feels his eyes turn wet.

He wipes at them and kisses his daughter’s head.

“I love you,” he whispers. Sometimes it’s just reassuring to say it to someone who he knows will say it back.

 

_ home. a place where I can go, to take this off my shoulders. someone take me home. _ ****

 

**16.**

_ I’ll fix it for us. we’re collecting dust but our love’s enough! _

 

Being the Hulk, sometimes he has no control over himself. Now is one of those sometimes.

He tries, he really does, to fight against it. To bury it. To push it down or at least have some semblance of what he’s doing because he needs to make sure he doesn’t hurt anybody, doesn’t kill anybody, doesn’t smash anybody; their screams haunt him at night, make it hard to sleep. It helps him understand Tony’s constant drink in hand.

And when he is green, it’s kind of like being asleep. It’s the most peaceful sleep he ever gets, until he opens his eyes and realizes what he’s done. Only the Other Guy can think when he’s Hulked out. Which means that when Bruce wakes up, it usually takes him awhile to figure out where he is and what’s happened.

But now, as he blinks groggily, it becomes abundantly clear.

He’s kneeling in the middle of a circle of bodies. Around him, the windows are broken and half the building has fallen away. Things are strewn across the room and he tries desperately to breathe, but he can’t.

First, Natasha, her body so twisted that her front is forward and her legs facing opposite, lying next to a large shape in the floor the size of a person;  _ Barton _ , Banner thinks, and clutches his stomach, feeling sick.

Then, Steve, motionless with his eyes closed and his shield buried in his stomach; he looks at peace, that’s the worst thing about it. Bruce turns away, not wanting to see. He lays eyes on Thor, who is holding the remnants of his hammer, and he looks up at Bruce with a sad smile and tired eyes.

“I am sorry, my friend.”

Bruce wants to scream at him for apologizing when  _ look what he did _ , look what he’s done, look at his family’s blood on his hands -

“Where’s Tony?”

He feels breathless, shaky, as if the ground he is standing on is not stable. Thor points to the left.

“Over there.”

He says nothing else. No other apology is needed, now that Bruce knows what the single one was for in the first place.

“No.”

He stumbles backwards in shock, catching himself against the counter, and then it settles in and he screams, sprinting towards the crumpled form on the floor only a hundred feet away, “NO!”

But there he is. Cold and limp and broken, bloody and bruised and lifeless, and Bruce picks the inventor up as gently as he can and cradles him to his chest. He presses his lips together and squeezes his eyes shut, but the tears fall anyway and his voice is thick with them.

“No. No. No.”

He feels Thor’s eyes on his back, but the thunder god makes no move to comfort him. It is useless to comfort a mourning murderer; the one at fault is always the one who loses the most.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce chokes out as he sobs, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”

Apologies do not heal broken hearts. Nor do they fix the mind. Only the breath of the dead can do that.

But the dead do not breathe.

 

_ just give me a reason, just a little bit’s enough. _ _ _

 

**17.**

_ all the shine of a thousand spotlights, all the stars we steal from the night sky will never be enough. _

 

Pierce does not authorize Nick Fury’s assassination. When he hears of it, it’s as the director is wheeled into the hospital, and Pierce immediately calls Rumlow.

“Who ordered Nick’s assassination?”

His voice is low and threatening, and under Rumlow’s usual growl there’s a tremor of fear.

“I did. We gave the Asset the mission after Fury found out a bit too much and shared with the Captain.”

Pierce grits his teeth.

“I never authorized this.”

Rumlow gulps. “No. We’re sorry, Secretary Pierce, but he was in the way -”

“No one is assassinated in the name of HYDRA without my permission! The Asset is not released without my permission!”

Pierce can practically hear Rumlow cowering.

“Sir -”

“Someone will die for this!” He manages to whisper-shout before he is suddenly facing Agent Romanoff. She looks at him with raised eyebrows, and for once in his life, Pierce does not think to murder her for merely her suspicion.

“He’s dead.”

Pierce nods curtly and brushes past her, rushing to the double doors.

(That night, Rumlow and his team are killed for releasing the Asset and killing Nick Fury. HYDRA wins the battle two weeks later on the helicarriers and anyone who dares to stand in their way perishes. Their ruler has cold dark eyes and wrinkled skin and a heavy frown, and he orders Rogers to be made into another soldier, and so begins the reign of HYDRA.

Pierce is never crossed again, though he does visit Nick’s grave once a year with a bouquet of daffodils.

None of these empires will ever mean a thing to him. No immense power could ever fill this void. Nothing can ever make him feel.

But one night as he sleeps, his two Assets assassinate him with straight-edged knives.

He is thankful.)

 

_ take my hand. will you share this with me? cause darling, without you. _ _ _

 

**18.**

_ revolutionaries wait for my head on a silver plate, just a puppet on a lonely string, oh, who would ever wanna be king? _

 

He always thought his brother would return. He always had before - gods could not die, Thor thought, at least not so young.

But now, he is not so sure.

Because it has been five thousand days since Loki perished in the fires with Hela, and Asgard became a floating ship that travelled the galaxy. And Thor sits upon his throne, staring out the window at the stars, just hoping for his brother to somehow appear over the horizon towards their new kingdom.

But he is nowhere to be found. By anyone, and there is no more hope for Asgard’s younger Jotun prince.

“My king,” Heimdall says, softly, and Thor does not look at him. Only at the stars, straight ahead, always. “He is not coming back.”

Thor is silent.

“What will we do now?”

Thor’s face is blank and indifferent, his tone cold. It scares Heimdall, the one who has practically raised him, because in all these years, he has never once seen the blonde as emotionless as he is now.

“We head to Earth. It is time the Migardians were ruled properly.”

Heimdall is quiet for a moment, trying to gage his king’s reaction to his next words.

“Is that really the best idea, Your Majesty?”

Thor slams his fist down on the side of his throne and Heimdall jumps. The blonde’s eyes are angry, unforgiving.

“Did I ask you?” His voice is low, quiet, almost a growl, though his fists are trembling with rage.

Heimdall is killed upon his refusal to silence himself. The Earth perishes at the thunder god’s hands, and Asgard with it.

Thor is alone now.

He laughs.

It is a cruel, dark, humorless sound.

(That night, Loki returns from the dead to watch his once beloved brother as he sleeps, and he is haunted by the reflection of who he used to be and what he used to want, splayed out on the bed in front of him, so many stab wounds in his chest that he has no more blood to bleed.

Loki cries golden tears for his once golden brother and the black vines ensnare him from behind and strangle him free of this heavy, burdened breathing.)

 

_ now in the morning, I sleep alone. sweep the streets I used to own. _ _ _

 

**19.**

_ so the years went by. I stayed the same but she began to drift away. I was left alone. _

 

The Soldier - no, his name is Bucky. He does not remember much, still, but he remembers his Stevie and how much he loved him. Also the woman in the red dress, and how much his Stevie loved her.

So now he’s standing on her doorstep, or at least, he hopes it is, with a paper in his hand, a scribbled address stained into the paper by ink.

He knocks.

There’s a shout, “Come in!” He does, and climbs the stairs to the door with the breathing behind it, and opens it.

He’s suddenly overwhelmed by an amazing array of colors, a million memories flashing back to him in an instant as he sees her tell-tale smile, and he breathes her name in relief and thanks, “Peggy.”

Her eyes twinkle with that old-time mischief, and he doesn’t know what he’s expecting, but she says, “Are you the new nurse Mary was telling me about?”

His face falls. “You don’t remember me.”

She cocks her head. “Should I? So sorry, dear, but my mind is so foggy these days. What’s your name again?”

“Bucky,” he answers, and he feels his chest caving in at even the slightest mention of the name.

Peggy’s eyes widen, and her smile widens to a grin, “Sergeant Barnes! How are you alive?”

He offers a weak smile and wanders to her bedside, sitting down and talking her hand. He forgets not to touch her with his metal one, but she simply smiles down at it in wonder and begins to explore its surface with her spindly, wrinkled fingers.

“It’s a long story. Most of which my mind is foggy over, too.”

She laughs. It’s huskier now, and she coughs, but it’s still beautiful. No wonder Steve loved her, he can’t help but think.

“Steve was so distraught when you fell from that freightcar, you know,” she says, softening, and piercing blue eyes and a red-lipped smile cross through his mind right before his mind goes blank and all he feels is rage, rage, rage, and he’s trembling with it.

His hands close around her neck and her eyes widen and water, but even as her cheeks turn blue, she smiles. Not red-lipped anymore, but still beautiful and kind and more accepting than he could ever be, even before… all of this.

“I am… sorry, Sergeant Barnes,” she wheezes, and he can tell she means it. “That someone as good as you has come to this. But you are not what they made you. Rarely do monsters become their makers, Bucky…”

At the name, he freezes, and then frantically pulls his hands from her throat, but it is too late. Her skin is bruised, practically broken, and she already has a hard enough time breathing anyway.

Her eyes slip shut and she goes limp, and he bites back a sob as the tears brim and escapes through the window.

His Stevie will never forgive him now.

 

_ when somebody loved me, everything was beautiful. every hour spent together lives within my heart. _ _ _

 

**20.**

_ trouble is her only friend and he’s back again, makes her body older than it really is. _

 

Three days.

Three days since Sam came home to his bleeding, breathing lover on the front porch with three bullet holes in his chest and choking Sam’s name towards the sky. Three days since the heart monitor had flatlined in surgery and they hadn’t been able to bring him back. Three days since the love of Sam’s life left, and he left with him.

Three days since Sam’s whole world ended.

“Maddy’s gone.”

When offered food.

“Maddy’s gone.”

When asked to go out.

“Maddy’s gone.”

When told the funeral’s in three weeks.

“Maddy’s gone.”

When pleaded to stop staring straight ahead and to just  _ cry _ , because how can they believe he’ll be alright if he won’t show any sign of humanity left at all?

“Maddy’s gone.”

A year later, on the anniversary of the End of the World, when they figure out he’ll never be alright at the sight of the three bullet wounds in his chest and the note in his hand, eyes glazed like grey skies.

_ Maddy’s gone. _

Steve chokes on his tears and pulls down Sam’s eyelids, whispers, “Sam’s gone.”

 

_ I’m watching you breathing for the last time. _ _ _

 

 

**21.**

_ I’d go to hell and back with you, stay lost in what we found. worlds apart we were the same until we hit the ground. _

 

For deadly little girls, they are good students, the Soldier thinks. It is a strange thought, as he has spent many years trying to adjust his mind to his orders;  _ Call them spiders,  _ he was told when he first arrived, but even with five more wipes, he cannot forget to see them as little children. He cannot forget to see them as innocent.

But this one. Natalia.

_ She _ is a murderer.

He can see it in her wide green eyes, though they narrow whenever she lays her gaze upon a victim; her deep emerald orbs can bore into the soul of any passing person, and Madame B does certainly intend to use it. While the little girls are spiders, Natalia is the Black Widow.

“ Солдат ,” she hisses when she comes in today, and his eye twitches. (soldier) Only his superiors may call him that; to her, he is зима. (winter) “маленький доктор говорит что вы должны вывезти меня на улицу.” (the little doctor says you are to take me outside)

He grits his teeth and grabs her roughly by the arm, the spurs of his metal hand digging into her skin and drawing blood, but Natalia complains not. Once they are outside, Madame B awaits, and she smiles cruelly at her redheaded pupil.

“Black Widow,” she says, voice raspy and quiet from too many cigarettes like the one pinched between her fingers now, and Natalia smiles sweetly and wickedly.

“Madame,” she says, loudly and aired with determination, “хорошего дня.” (good day)

Madame B nods. “И вам того же, Natalia. Вы приняли решение?” (you as well, have you made your decision)

The Soldier watches this exchange curiously. Natalia does not seem to be thinking straight…

She smiles now. “Да, Madame. Я решил, что вам пора умирать.” (yes, I have decided it is time for you to die)

And then the Widow lunges.

Her tiny hands around Madame B’s throat, her teeth bared and eyes barely slits; she is as fearsome as a lion, a snake with the talons of a bird and she is fearless, hopeless, shameless.

The Madame’s face is blue and bulging, purple too with anger when the Soldier finally manages to pull Natalia back into his arms, but she is still rearing.

“Убить этого ребенка!” Madame B shouts, but she only has the time to utter the order before the Soldier loses his grip on the young assassin and she is back to her mission, her mission and her mission only. (kill that child)

“Ты умрешь,” Natalia hisses, she promises. “Я убью тебя за тех невинных людей которых ты убил,  как Dragomiroff’s Дочь Драгомирова во сне, когда я умолял ее жизнь богу, я никогда не верил в потому что, если он не спасет меня, он не спасет никого! Но я подумал, что он может спасти ее, маленькую девочку…” (You will die. I will slaughter you for those innocents you killed, like Dragomiroff’s daughter in her sleep while I pleaded for her life to a god I never had faith in because if he could not save me then he could not save anybody! But I thought perhaps he could save her, a little girl…)

At this point, Madame B’s face is going grey and her eyes have slipped shut; the Soldier knows the dead when he sees them. He gently pries the crying Natalia off of her captor, but it will do no good; the guns are all pointed at them now. He presses her face to his chest as she sniffles and he whispers comforts, prays it will be quick and quiet…

“Ты маленькая девочка,” he rasps, so gently in her ear, and she sniffs. “Вы невиновны.” (you are a little girl, you are an innocent)

A tear runs down her cheek and she closes her eyes. “Нет,” she whispers. “Нет.” (no, no, I am not)

The Soldier’s eyes flick from side to side and he makes his choice.

The life is squeezed out of the little girl so easily, so quickly, and the Black Widow falls limp to the ground, killed by the one person she always trusted not to harm her.

“Для Natalia,” he grunts, and charges. (for)

The Red Room burns and with it, the Soldier. He cradles the red-haired murderer close to his chest and sobs his only agony; that he had saved her.

Freedom should not mean a broken neck, but she is free, now.

 

_ maybe I’m crazy, maybe I’m weak. maybe I’m blinded by what I see. you wanted a soldier but it wasn’t me cause I could never set you free. _ _ _

 

**22.**

_ I am nobody posing as a someone. _

 

Her brother is dead.

There is not much point to life now, as she can feel nothing but the fury running through her veins; the one her brother died for is now squatting next to her as she hides and cries in a crumbling building.

“You can sit here and die,” he tells her, “or you can go out there and fight. You can stay, or you can be an Avenger.”

She narrows her eyes. The nerve, for him to tell her she has a choice; her whole life, she has never had a choice. And now her reason for living is dead himself, and for this man, Barton, and she hates the archer so desperately she aches with it.

But he is gone. Back into the chaos, and she watches through the gaping hole in the stone wall, and closes her eyes, feeling the magic coursing through her.

They can all go to hell, she decides. Die in the new sky-high Sokovia or be crushed beneath it, she couldn’t care less where their bones end up lying, so long as they are as broken as her heart is.

“You are liars,” she hisses beneath her breath, and opens her eyes to the dust of death as the building caves in on her burning red body.

She does not regret the pain the Barton man feels when he finds her afterwards.

 

_ I’m only a child, I’m only a child. _ _ _

 

**23.**

_ I remember you said, “don’t leave me here alone.” but all is dead and gone and passed, tonight. _

 

The rescue-opp mission is the easiest they’ve ever been on. Almost too easy, and so they’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, for someone to get shot or an alarm to sound.

But no bullets are shot. The air is tense and silent, like a cougar waiting to pounce. The enemy is, simply, entirely underprepared.

So they take them down easily. And return to camp for another night of sleep, hand in hand.

Sam is awake long after Riley, holding his lover to his chest, and he watches the sleeping man’s chest rise and fall, afraid it will stop at any moment. He has nightmares, they’ve all had them; the idea of losing one another is simply too unbearable. Most think their scarce sleep sprouts from memories, but no; it’s the imaginary ends that haunt them the most.

“I love you,” Sam whispers, and Riley turns and curls deeper into Sam’s chest, mumbling something back against his shirt. Sam kisses the soldier’s forehead and closes his eyes, tries to sleep.

He wakes in the morning, to the sound of planes rumbling over the camp; he shakes Riley awake and gives him a quick kiss before they’re out on the field with everyone else, skyrocketing into the air hand in hand.

This time, there are alarms. This time, there are bullets. This time, the enemy is very,  _ very _ prepared.

And Sam doesn’t even feel the bullet that hits his heart; he just drops from the sky and his eyelids droop closed as he slips into unconsciousness; the last thing he sees is Riley, mouth open mid-scream and reaching for him.

Just their luck; they may always fall for each other, but in the end, only one of them will fall for good.

(Sam thinks it is just as well that it’s him rather than Riley, much as his lover may disagree.

The lovebirds are no more, their friends whisper, and Riley screeches up at the grey sky and coughs blood and dives into the ocean, but they rescue him against his will.

He thrashes and fights, but simply goes limp when they murmur Sam’s name.

_ Live for him, _ they say so softly, and Riley does, however empty he may be.

Sam feels the hole in his chest gape around the bullet, presses his hand to the glass of Riley’s window, and wonders when he ever knew this madman wet from alcohol and cut with broken bottles in front of him, collapsed and nearly dead on the ground.

Sam feels no urge to save him; he feels nothing at all. An unbeating heart cannot love.)

 

_ I remember tears streaming down your face when I said I’d never let you go. _ _ _

 

**24.**

_ we both lie silently still in the dead of night. _

 

Bucky hates fire. Always has, it’s too hot, it burns, it’s all too rough and wild and unstoppable, invincible, almost, and as a coward he hates invincible things.

So of course he does not mean to start the one that’s raging now.

It’s just that, he was with Steve and they were talking and they were laughing and it was somewhat happy, but then it wasn’t because the woman in the red dress with the red lips walked in and suddenly all Steve could see was her, his eyes twinkling, and all Bucky could see was red, red, red.

Alcohol burns, he knows this, it’s flammable like all good things. But he never thought it’d kill so many in such a way.

Now only he remains, far as he knows, and he’s screaming Steve’s name as he dances through the flames and he hears a broken voice in return, his Stevie’s.

“Peggy!”

Bucky runs in that direction, and there he is, America’s darling Captain, or Peggy’s, it seems, because he’s cradling her in his arms and crying, and Bucky stops short in his tracks, scuffing up the dirt in front of him.

Steve looks up at him, eyes brokenhearted blue and tearstains on his cheeks, and Bucky feels his breath leave him, “I’m so sorry.”

It’s barely a whisper, but his best friend hears, and suddenly roars in fury and lunges at him, pinning Bucky to the ground and sitting on top of him, pummelling his face with his fists, and Bucky feels no hurt even as his nose breaks and his vision blurs, only when he hears Steve’s cry of pain as his knuckles fracture.

“I didn’t mean to,” he croaks, the blood making it hard to breathe, and Steve lands an especially hard hit close to his eye, and Bucky spits to the side. A tooth, some red.

Red.

“You killed her!” Steve screams, voice breaking. “You killed my Peggy!”

Bucky smiles blearily. “Cause she was yours.”

This angers Steve further, “Couldn’t let me have a girl, one I really loved, for once in my life, Bucky?!”

Bucky feels his breathing slow, his eyelids droop. He’s dying, he knows. He inhales sharply and gasps with the pain of it, then rasps, “No.”

Steve is silent. Bucky chokes up his last words.

“Couldn’t let a girl have you.”

And then he slips away, life snuffed out like the flame of a candle, like the flames of the fire blazing around them now, and Steve lets a sob rip from his throat and collapses on top of his best friend, crying for the losses he’s suffered.

“I killed you,” he wails, his guilt consuming him, “I’m sorry.”

But apologies don’t wave to death, and so Steve drags Bucky’s body to the nearest blistering pit of red, and lets out a broken war cry as they fall into it together.

The fire is put out by the rain, and then the next day, it snows.

But the ash is so deep, it may as well be Pompeii.

 

_ I know I could’ve saved a love that night if I’d known what to say. _ _ _

 

**25.**

_ I can’t help but be wrong in the dark cause I’m overcome in this war of hearts. _

 

New York is half in ruins by the time the portal has closed and the nuke is streaking towards them. Tony is dead on the ground, Steve crying over him, so goddamned sad because if Howard didn’t love his own son then the least Steve could do was try not to hate him and instead he’s been spewing words of anger, anger, anger and he hates himself for it.

Natasha’s curled in Clint’s arms, unable to tell him that she loves him but unable to let him go, and finally she whispers, “It’s like Budapest all over again,” and he chuckles and kisses her red hair; his laughter is choked out through tears.

“You and I remember Budapest very differently,” he murmurs back, and she lifts her head and turns just enough to lock their lips, squeezing her eyes shut; at least when they finally meet their inevitable demise, it will be together.

Bruce is standing tired, alone, in the middle of the road, watching all these people he’s just met crying for each other, and he wonders if he could possibly call them friends; it would explain the twinge of something in his chest at the sight of their pain.

Loki is smiling wickedly, but Thor can see the fear in his eyes. Loki has always been the one to cause the trouble and then the one to be afraid of it. He walks toward his brother slowly, arms wide and open, hammer left behind and hidden somewhere deep inside the city.

“I am sorry for everything that’s ever happened to you,” Thor tells his lover, softly, and Loki turns to look at him and his smile falls.

“Your mere words are not enough,” he rasps, and Thor closes his eyes as the scepter comes to his chest; he opens his glazed-over eyes and nods to Loki, his new master.

He does not see the pain in his brother’s eyes, for he can see nothing anymore, but he does hear distant screams and looks down in time to see an explosion that he feels rock the earth beneath the tower he stands on, and Loki’s hands are suddenly grasping him.

“I wanna go home, brother,” he mumbles, voice wavering, his eyes filling with tears, and at that, Thor shakes his head and awakens.

Thousands, millions, of aliens and humans alike fall to the ground, limp with death as the radiation kills them, and most of their skin shrivels and boils. Loki whimpers and buries his face in Thor’s chest, and the blonde wraps his arms around him.

“But my home has just been destroyed, Loki,” he whispers, “and I can do nothing to bring it back.”

Loki crumples to his knees and sobs.

Magic always comes with a price.

 

_ I can’t help but love you, even though I try not to. I can’t help but want you. I know that I’d die without you. _ _ _

 

**26.**

_ I saw myself in summer nights. stars lit up like candlelight. I make my wish but mostly I believe. _

 

They had never known the full extent of Vision’s immortality, that much was always clear. But while none of them expected to outlive him, he does not expect to outlive them.

“Wanda,” he pleads, praying to a god his infinite mind knows isn’t real. “Please, my love. Stay with me.”

But she does not wake. He adjusts her fingers in his, weaving them together and pressing a kiss to the back of her hand. He remembers when she was young, and they had nothing to worry about and no one to worry for, but oh, how different it is now.

The Tower is barren, empty, with only the sound of her and him breathing. Vacant, all the Avengers dead and gone and their children perished in a long ago battle; Vision could’ve saved them, that time, but he was instead focused on Wanda, perfectly safe and fighting her own monsters at the edge of the facility’s lot. Now, he lives with the guilt of destroying the light in his friends’ eyes, which lead, inevitably, to their deaths.

Suddenly, the hand in his begins to cool, and he can only catch the faint thump-thump of one heart, and he shakes Wanda but she lies there, still, and he kisses her lips but that only works in the fairytales, none of which he has read.

“I’m sorry,” he begs to the sky, tears streaming down his cheeks, “for whatever I did to deserve this. Take me too, or take me instead, just save her, please.”

But no god answers because no god is there.

And he is angry. Angry at himself for living, at his love for dying, at the god who never seems to care or be home to hear the knocks or get the letters or listen to his helpless people’s prayers; Vision screams.

He closes his eyes as everything disappears from beneath his feet, the world crumbling to ash.

He sleeps.

The world dies with him.

Why was he worthy, again? He cannot remember.

Was there anything  _ to _ remember?

(He cannot remember that either.)

 

_ and where I was was beautiful. _ _ _

 

**27.**

_ how can I say this without breaking? _

 

Steve had never expected Tony to be so okay with it. So accepting of his husband kissing a dead man, so content to share his lover, so in love with his husband’s dead man himself.

But Tony is okay with it, more than okay with it, happy with it, and so Bucky kisses Steve and Steve kisses Tony and Tony kisses Bucky and they are all happy, though the rest of the nation may find them peculiar.

But their friends don’t. And so they live on.

Except, then Thanos comes, and another war is started, to large for even them to comprehend, and the three lovers march into battle together, only to become two thirds of a whole.

When their fellow soldiers, their friends, their lives start crumbling to dust in front of them, they of course panic. They chase the others, all crashing into each other, and for a moment, they are safe.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” Steve breathes, head pressed against his husband’s and Tony’s hands on his neck, both their eyes closed as they pant in relief.

“Me too,” Tony murmurs, but then they hear their names so brokenly whimpered and turn to see their third slowly turning to ash.

“Bucky!” They both scream, and rush to his side, but the one in question can only smile painfully and then close his eyes, falling apart completely at last as he disintegrates into nothing.

Steve and Tony collapse to their knees, broken beyond belief, and pay no attention to the survivors wandering around them. Tony stares at his hands while Steve frantically digs at the ground, clawing at it desperately as if that’ll somehow change anything, and his husband makes no move to tell him it won’t work.

And for the last few weeks of their lives, of the battle, they try to go back to who and what they were before; together in sickness and in health, till death do them part.

But it does not work, because the priest forgot to mention that it does not have to be their own deaths for it to tear them to pieces.

They now regard each other with cold, lingering stares, hair standing up on the back of their necks and goosebumps on their arms, chills running up their spines and blind hatred in their eyes; they have no one to point to, no one to blame, because who can you fault for the unexplained?

And so now they are enemies, rather than lovers, and gladly die at Thanos’ hands rather than live another day with the recent vacantness of their souls.

Their friends, per the lovers’ wishes and true to their word, do not mourn them.

But oh, how they war.

(And oh, how they lose.)

 

_ I loved and I loved and I lost you. _ _ _

 

**28.**

_ if today I woke up with you right beside me, like all of this was just some twisted dream, I’d hold you closer than I ever did before. _

 

He cannot know her.

Hard as she tries, desperately as she pleads, he cannot recognize her. And she feels herself breaking, breaking, breaking into the so many pieces of shattered glass that litter the floor they fight on now.

“Birdbrain,” she pants, but he swings. She dodges easily, but he still somehow manages to punch her heart and she feels it, down to her very bones. “Clint, please, don’t do this to me.”

He doesn’t stop; he lunges again. She sidesteps and grabs him by the hair, twisting him around to face her; his nose is broken. It bleeds, scarlet trickling down onto his lips, and she bends down and kisses him, squeezing her eyes shut and tasting every fiber of his brainwashed being, the salt and the tears and the loss.

He shoves her away with a roar.

She stumbles back and hits her head on the rail, but gets up again, ignoring the white spots starting to cloud her vision. He pulls her hair and she bites him, and then she grabs his blonde strands again and cries, “I. Love. You!”

It’s the most truthful thing she’s ever uttered, and his forehead hits the yellow pole and he falls to the floor, twitching, eyes drooping shut. She rushes to his side, brushing back his hair from his sweaty skin.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, shushing him as he whimpers in pain, “I’m sorry.”

And she draws the knife from her boot with the nasty image in mind of what she must do, and she then lets out a sob as she raises it over his back with her shaking hands.

“I love you,” she croaks. “And I owe you this debt. You’d do the same for me, I know.”

As the knife pierces his skin, she catches the softest whisper, “Tasha.”

She screams and yanks the metal ungently from his skin, but it is too late. He’s dead, gone, never to return.

She keels over with sickness and passes out on top of him.

Unfortunately, she wakes up.

 

_ I wish that I could wake up with amnesia, and forget about the stupid little things. like the way it felt to fall asleep next to you, and the memories I never can escape. _ _ _

 

**29.**

_ cold bones, oh, where’s my love? she hides away, like a ghost, in the night! _

 

Deep in the snow, buried, is a cement building. Cold on the outside, cold on the inside, and in its dark corridors are held people, frozen in time like the ice freezing over the windowless walls.

A little girl waits, asleep, for the father she never met and the mother who gave her up and the monster who kept her safe.

None will come.

A million worlds away, it feels like, there is a captain who has just been arrested for trying to help his fugitive friend. Friend, lover, it all mixes together in and for the media and soon nobody cares what label is used, just that there is justice.

No one knows of their little girl, buried beneath the ice just like her fathers once were, so long ago, where they wish they could be again.

The sergeant kills himself, thrashing against the walls of his confining bulletproof glass cage, and his eyes are wide and empty as he stares up at the ceiling. His friend, lover, whatever you want to call it is shot down as he shouts the sergeant’s name and tries to rush towards his side, to save him.

Neither is saved, the captain nor the sergeant, and their friends grieve and battle the government until they are forced into hiding or to their own deaths.

The world no longer cares. These people are simply stories to them, not heroes, not villains, not humans, and so what do they care, but the world forgets the child buried in its breast.

She will not be saved either.

 

_ cold sheets, oh, where’s my love? _ _ _

 

**30.**

_ you taste like whiskey when you kiss me, oh, I’d give anything again to be your babydoll. _

 

He’s not allowed to fall in love with his patients.

He knows this, and yet he can’t help but fall for her; besides, she is ninety-something and he’s just past thirty. It’s ridiculous to feel attached to her, to love her, to pine for her, and yet he does.

She has a husband, of course, much as she forgets his name and face every other day and night now. His name is Steve, America’s golden boy, Captain America himself and while he loves Peggy, loves that they rescued him in time for him to be with her, he simply cannot move on.

He looks as young as Sam, but he is older now, much older, in mind and heart and soul, though Sam is pretty sure he’s the only one who notices. And Steve cannot let go of his biggest failure, his most haunting regret; Bucky Barnes’ death.

Still, alcohol does not affect him, and so he drinks all the more of it, and meanwhile Sam holds Peggy’s shaking wrinkled hands and smiles at her and lets her tell him stories.

It is a broken, broken world, but it’s the one they’ve got. And so when Peggy dies, Sam is the one who tells Steve, and is appalled to get only a shrug.

“You loved her!” Sam shouts. “You’d better have loved her!” And Steve turns and stares at him, blank blue eyes and a comfortable frown, as if there’s simply nothing left inside him.

“As did you,” he says calmly, “and yet you’re yelling at me rather than carrying her coffin to the altar.”

At that, Sam crumples, wind gone from his lungs like his love from the world, and Steve is right there to catch him.

“I’m sorry,” the captain whispers, and that’s when Sam feels it sink down deep into his bones

_ She’s gone. In her sleep. _

 

_ been a long time since I came around, been a long time but I’m back in town. and this time, I’m not leaving without you. _ _ _

 

 

**31.**

_ you’ll never know the murderer sitting next to you, you’ll never know the psychopath sitting next to you, you’ll never know the freakshow sitting next you. after all I’ve said, please don’t forget. _

 

“I’m not gonna fight you. You’re my friend.”

The Soldier only recognizes ‘fight’, as he’s spent so long without friends that he’s forgotten what they are. So he narrows his eyes and accepts the challenge he thinks he’s heard.

He lets out a war cry and charges, knocking the blonde man to the ground (or whatever you’d call the fragile surface that’s just barely holding them up).

“You’re my mission,” he snarls, and for once in his life, he isn’t really sure that’s all the bloodied man is, but he can’t afford those thoughts. He won’t remember in a few hours anyway.

Any fire in the mission’s eyes seems to go out at those words, and he utters some of his own, hoarse and broken but firm, determined, trusting; the Soldier should not be trusted. He has already killed plenty for their trust that they are safe with the blinds open.

“Then finish it. Cause I’m with you… till the end a the line.”

The Soldier hesitates. He knows those words. Somewhere, in the back of his fucked-up and empty mind… a trigger word, perhaps? A command?

The glass beneath them breaks and down the mission falls. The Soldier catches himself, watching as the blonde man goes under; he doesn’t need to go after him. He’ll drown in there, he’s as good as dead.

But he does.

He drags the unconscious man to shore, and stares down at him for a moment, bloody and choking and gasping, eyelids fluttering.

_ I’m so glad, Stevie,  _ he suddenly hears a whisper, hidden behind sad eyes and a grin, his old face…  _ I’m so happy it was me who fell off that freight car instead of you. Better me than you. Better… freight car...  _

**Longingrustedseventeendaybreakfurnaceninebenignhomecomingone**

**_freightcar._ **

His fingers close around the gasping man’s throat and he finishes his mission, as instructed, and steels himself, ignoring the bile rising in his throat and the unnecessary tears slipping down his cheeks.

Then he walks away, back to his handlers, leaving the dead mission for someone who cares about him to find.

(HYDRA no longer needs their Soldier, with S.H.I.E.L.D. entirely under their control. He goes back into cryofreeze and never comes out.

He is murdered by HYDRA’s cold, unforgiving hands. All seven and a half billion of them.

He wakes up to white snow, remembering a name and fierce blue eyes; he sees someone lying next to him and it’s his Stevie, dead and strangled and looking way too calm for Bucky’s liking.

“Wake up,” he pleads, shaking his best friend; he kisses him frantically. No response comes, will ever come.)

(Someone who cares (perhaps too much) about the Captain has found him.)

 

_ you don’t know the half of the abused. _ _ _

 

**32.**

_ and there you are, sitting in the garden, clutching my coffee. calling me sugar! you called me sugar! _

 

Clint can honestly say he never expected someone like her to be the one he loved, much as she can say she never expected to have this, a marriage.

Budapest is a nice place to spend their honeymoon. It’s quiet, up in their hotel room, but loud down on the streets with the busy passerby; they, for once, don’t have to worry about somebody finding them and murdering them in their sleep.

At least, not in their sleep, it seems. Because he wakes up with her in his arms and kisses her good morning and they’re out on the deck, sipping coffee and reading the newspaper and holding hands, and he whispers in her ear, half hidden by her hair as she ducks her head to drink, “I love you, darlin’.”

She smiles over the rim of her cup, turns to kiss him; they lock the door behind them and walk out into the courtyard, hand in hand, feeling alive and free in a way they haven’t been able to in ages; that’s when they hear the gunshots.

It’s almost simultaneous with the screaming; people run in a panic and crash into each other and one scared man runs straight through her and him, separating them, and Natasha shouts his name as he cries hers and they reach for one another only to be pushed farther and farther apart by more and more people finding their direction, joining the masses that are all heading south.

Natasha frantically turns her head, looking high and low for her husband; she can’t have lost him, not this soon, she can’t -

“Nat!” She hears, and looks up just in time to see his grey eyes widen as the bullet hits his mark, his head, and he falls to the ground.

She screams and rushes forward, shoving random passerby out of her way as she scrambles to his side; she falls to her knees beside him and lifts his head, pressing it to her chest; she cradles him.

“Shh,” she whispers, “shh, it’s gonna be okay, I love you, it’s alright.”

He reaches up a hand, which shakes violently, and grasps her bicep. She trembles with him, looking down into his half-lidded and scared eyes.

“Tasha,” he rasps, and she silences him with her mouth on his; “I know,” she assures him hoarsely, “I know, I know, I know.”

The effect is almost instantaneous, and he goes limp in her arms.

She calls in an extraction from her own honeymoon, and no one questions the broken Black Widow, as now she has become one.

There are no words, no voices, that can reach her.

 

_ and it’s only half past the point of no return. _ _ _

 

**33.**

_ we made quite a mess. it’s probably better off this way. but I confess, in my dreams, you’re touching my face, and asking me if I wanna try again with you… and I almost do! _

 

T’Challa approaches him slowly, cautiously, and glances over at Bucky. Bucky says nothing, as there’s nothing to say; he’s been a broken man his whole life, and most of it is nothing HYDRA did, and all of it is nothing they can fix. It’s his scars, his pain, his wounds, and he’ll gladly let them reopen again and again so long as it means his Stevie smiles; even if Bucky just bleeds, bleeds, bleeds.

The king is kind, though. Gentle. He does not pressure the injured sergeant into anything, and is as careful with Bucky as he can be.

“The Captain,” T’Challa starts uncertainly now, and Bucky fixes his eyes straight ahead, setting his mouth into a straight line. He’s had more than a lifetime of practice, waiting in the shadows too long to go after what he wants and then losing it to the darkness’ clutches, himself included; he knows how to hide what he wants and what he needs, because transparency is a dangerous thing, and he will not let himself be one more dangerous thing.

He is already enough.

“The Captain,” T’Challa repeats, “has found a little girl at one of the HYDRA facilities. She’s been woken from cryosleep, and is reported to often ask for her father in Russian. The doctors…”

He pauses, hesitating, opens his mouth and closes it again until he finally finds the courage to put Bucky’s truth, his most deepest secret, into words. “The doctors think she may be yours.”

Bucky doesn’t move, doesn’t tense, doesn’t turn. Simply, he says, “Steve and Peggy’s. I protected her when HYDRA had her, is all. We both paid the price for it.”

T’Challa watches him with mournful eyes. “Do you not wish to see her?”

And this.

This is the kind of moment that Bucky has always shied away from, too scared to tell the truth and too transparent to lie; it’s why they all know his entire body, could map his entire mind, could tell you exactly what he feels and what he wants and what he needs.

But now, Bucky has finally been discovered. The truth of him, of the Soldier, of HYDRA’s committed crimes and the ones they never got the chance to do anything past plan; the truth of his daughter, the one he has always wished would one day be found and saved.

He looked for her, those two years before the bombing in Vienna. Couldn’t find a damn thing. She was buried, deep within the memories of dead criminals and the amnesic Peggy Carter. Steve never knew, of course; Bucky had to protect him, like he always had. But now, he’d know. And now, he’d raise Bucky’s daughter the way she always deserved, the way Bucky never could.

“No,” he finally answers. Not honestly, not fleetingly, not real. But it’s not a lie. He can’t see her, even if he wants to; he doesn’t need to see her, even if he wants to; in the end, it doesn’t matter what he feels or wants or needs, and it never will. What matters is the blue-lipped little girl.

T’Challa puts a hand on Bucky’s shoulder and squeezes, once, twice, and seems to consider saying something else. But the apology burning on his tongue is never delivered, and for that Bucky is grateful.

The king turns to leave, and he’s at the doorway when Bucky says one last thing.

“Her name is Maria.”

T’Challa utters nothing, yet again, and nods. “I will tell the Captain.”

And finally, Bucky feels the tears come forward, and he shuts his eyes tight and does what needs to be done, has needed to be done for awhile, at least a century.

He breaks his own heart.

“Don’t.”

 

_ and I bet you’re sitting in your chair by the window, looking out at the city and I hope sometimes you wonder about me. _ _ _

 

**34.**

_ you’re screwed up and brilliant and look like a million dollar man. so why is my heart broke? _

 

After Captain America dives the Red Skull’s plane into the ocean, Peggy Carter becomes a blank slate. She sobs her heart out on that control panel, sending it into a fritz; Howard Stark finds her. He takes her to his plane, where he places her near a window and lets her watch the rain fall through the dark clouds as he drives, or pilots, I guess, and then he gets them both honorably discharged, takes her home to his rich home in Manhattan, and marries the broken woman simply so she won’t have to be mistreated by anybody else.

But then she awakens one night, next to him, eyes wide and frightened, and screeches  _ his _ name, claws his skin to shreds as he tries to calm her down, and then grabs every picture of  _ him  _ one by one and tosses them into the fire, frames and glass and all, and like the glass against the cinder bricks, she shatters.

She collapses in the middle of the kitchen floor, sobbing relentlessly into her hands, and he feels helpless, so helpless, because she is now a million mirror shards scattered around his apartment, and in each piece of her he sees his own violent reflection.

And she won’t stop crying. And he hates having his weaknesses spelled out plainly for him. And he can’t stand that she stands by him, as his wife, but never wears his rings and never takes his time and never touches his lips because they may be bound legally in every way but she was always  _ his  _ and she will always be  _ his  _ even though  _ he _ has never been and will never be hers, too busy dying in hopes of seeing his best friend, whose screams haunted his dreams up until the day he decided to drown in the noise and freeze everybody out. (Oh, the irony.)

And so he slaps her. Hard.

She falls to the side, hair falling in front of her face, now stained with a red handprint; she cries harder, starts calling  _ his  _ name so that he may come and help her, and it’s then he knows the woman he loves is well and truly gone, replaced by a mad wench who whores herself out in bars in hopes of finding the right partner to dance with, who’ll never be him, or  _ him _ , because no matter how much he’s tried to change it -

“He’s gone!” Howard roars, and Peggy wails, retching on her hands and knees, her hair tangled and damp with sweat and tears; her red lipstick is smudged across her cheek.

“I know,” she sobs, “I know, I know, I know, but…”

She never finishes, dissolving back into tears, and he crumples to his knees in front of her, hands out in front of him as he stares down at them, red with the unseen blood of a captain and his missing friend and this broken woman.

Red with the force of the blow he’s laid upon her, and he wraps her in his arms, holding her close as she shakes and trembles, and then he grabs the leaking vodka bottle from the counter.

“To Steve,” he raises a glass, and so does she, sniffling. “I’m… sorry.”

He doesn’t say for what, and Peggy gives the faintest smile; it looks sadistic, as if she’s imagining her own death.

“To Steve,” she cheers, then knocks back her shot and falls dead on the table with the poison he slipped in.

He buries his face in her hair and sobs.

 

_ holding me tight in our final hour. _ _ _

 

**35.**

_ I suppose it could be true but there are worse things I could do. _

 

A king does what’s best for his people. That’s the first lesson they learn as princes, and goddamnit, now that Thor’s gone, Loki’s trying desperately to do exactly that, except that his idea of what’s best and what actually is best are very different.

But the point is, Loki’s trying. But it’s hard to get things done for people when those people hate you for doing them, and when you can’t eat or drink in fear of being poisoned, and when the person you love most in the world is well and truly gone and you have nothing left to live for, no reasons to continue.

And now, he speaks to a sketch.

It’s not even realistic, it isn’t one of those magical ones they’ve got hung up all around the kingdom, it’s just one of those crude drawings they made together when they were younger and more naive, when they had no idea just how much was different between them and just how forcefully it would drive them apart.

It’s not a complicated image, either. Just him and Thor, holding hands, scribbled just a few years before that fateful kiss in the dungeons that started their downfall.

Many kisses more accompanied their downfall, however.

And now, to the sketch he speaks.

“I love you,” he whispers, confesses. “More dearly than anyone else, but I cannot rule without you. I cannot live on without you.” He laughs hollowly, humorlessly. “I’ve run out of reason.”

And he wishes, more than anything, that Thor would appear. That Loki could throw something at him and he’d smile and say he was actually here, just like Loki used to do, but he can’t. He won’t.

And so Loki must learn to live without him, as he is a god, and gods do not die.

It is, perhaps, worse. That Thor chooses to stay away and let Asgard fall to ruins at his brother’s hands rather than be close to Loki ever again, but at the thought, along with the sadness coursing through him comes anger, fury, the thirst for vengeance fueled by his hurt and he sets his jaw and narrows his eyes, accepting the only emotion he’s ever truly been able to feel.

“You want me to burn?” He laughs, tearfully. Manically, like a madman. “Then your precious Asgard will burn with me.”

Thor would’ve said it was theirs, but Loki always knew better.

And so the god of mischief does burn, going down in the flames he sets for himself. But not before locking the gates.

And Asgard wars against itself, fingers pointing and people blaming and the one at fault dead in a pile of ash and searching for his brother in a hell he’s somehow been sent to because those higher up than him only seem to judge actions, not thoughts or feelings or words, and so he is alone, wandering.

Thor returns to find a city that’s blazed worse than Pompeii, and says nothing. Since he is a god himself, he knows when there is no hope of redemption.

He does not even try to pray.

(Instead he kisses the ash and whispers those three lethal words, hoping that somewhere, the one they’re meant for can hear.

Instead, Loki hears them and screams bloody murder. But his hands are too red for him to spill anymore blood.

And anyway, he’s already gotten used to being cold and blue.)

 

_ but to cry in front of you. that’s the worst thing I could do. _

 

**36.**

_ love isn’t all that it seems, I did you wrong. stay here with you, until this dream is gone. _

__

Steve lands the Red Skull’s plane after dropping the bombs in the ocean. The explosions are muted and grey, plain blasts of light he hardly sees, like how fireworks used to look before the serum, when he and Bucky sat out on the firescapse on the Fourth of July and kissed like nobody was watching for once in their lives.

Just like him to ruin all that with Peggy, but Bucky fell, anyway, and it wouldn’t’ve helped. They always knew they didn’t have a future together, and that’s besides the point.

The point is, Steve Rogers has never been weak. No matter how he looked, what he weighed, what he thought. And so he is strong enough to live on without James Barnes.

Much as it’ll kill him in the end.

Howard’s the one who takes the plane to get him. Peggy, too, but she doesn’t kiss him when she sees him, though her expression seems to open with blissful relief. Instead, she threads their fingers together and is silent.

Steve marries her.

Soon after they return home from war, and he chokes on his tears while trying to keep them in, the first time he sees the apartment without Bucky. But still.

And he’s happy, and is delighted when his nephew is born in 1970; Anthony Stark, the genius child of Howard Stark and some other woman that Steve’s never met. Tony, they call him, and he gets along splendidly with Maria, Steve and Peggy’s daughter.

And then Peggy dies suddenly, with Maria in an unexplained car accident. There’s something suspicious about it all, Steve feels, because though the police say she must’ve been torn apart in the crash, his daughter’s body is never found, and no parts either, though Peggy is as good as dead. And Steve lives with Howard and Tony now, deep in his grief but not so much to drink, because he knows it will do nothing for him.

Except one night, Steve wakes up to the sound of a window creaking open. He growls; sometimes he hates his super hearing. But nonetheless, he walks out into the living room where the sound is coming from, and finds the silhouette of a little girl sitting on the couch; she looks to be nine years old.

The exact age Maria was when she died.

And as he gets closer, he realizes it’s because that’s exactly who she is.

“Ria?” He whispers, and she turns her dark eyes towards him, then screams.

“Папа!”

There’s a crashing sound that comes from one of the bedrooms and suddenly a man is bursting forth, in a mask and head-to-toe black clothing, and he scoops Maria up into his arms and as she buries her face in his shoulder, he points a gun to Steve’s head.

“Did you touch her?”

His voice is threatening, low, muffled by the mask and Steve shakes his head.

The man asks something else, and Steve furrows his brow.

“I can’t hear you.”

The man seems annoyed, but ultimately takes off his mask. Steve gasps and stumbles back with the shock that comes with seeing his dead lover for the first time in however many years, holding in his arms Steve’s dead daughter, and he whispers, “Bucky?” as if saying it any louder could be allowing the madness to finally consume him.

The man looks affronted. “Who the hell is Bucky?”

Steve doesn’t get the chance to answer.

In the morning, when the mailman knocks on the door and nobody answers, the police are called. Everybody sings the praises of the dead, poor Captain America and Howard Stark.

Tony Stark is left an orphan. He runs away from all his foster homes.

A year after the murders, Tony Stark disappears, and it’s all the papers can talk about.

He is found by his father and uncle’s graves, along with the body of an unconscious little girl - Captain America’s long-lost daughter. Over them stands a man clad entirely in black, and the grave digger sees him shoot both the children and then himself, in the head.

The grave digger goes back to digging, three new holes this time. There is simply no point in trying to warm what’s cold.

__

_ I’ve been sleepwalking, too close to the fire, but it’s the only place that I can hold you tight. _ _ _

 

**37.**

_ dear lord, when I get to heaven, please let me bring my man! when he comes, tell me that you’ll let him in. _

__

Bucky is, finally, home. It’s almost scary to Steve how it takes no time at all getting used to the sight of Bucky sleeping in his bed, or cooking in the kitchen, or watching TV in the living room, because quite honestly, Steve is afraid of what it might mean. He and Bucky something,  _ everything _ to each other before and as much as Steve doesn’t want to force it he also can’t stand to wait much longer for Bucky’s skin on his. He’s put himself in too much danger, waded in too deep, trusted too much of his love to one person.

Goddamnit, it would’ve been so much easier if he’d chosen Peggy.

Except he knows, deep down inside, that he never would’ve been happy with her and he’d’ve killed himself at thirty, too sad and hopeless and selfish to do much of anything else and Steve can never regret kissing Bucky that night, his sixteenth birthday with the fireworks going off just like the sparks he could feel all over his body as Bucky made love to him in their creaky little bed and Steve prayed,  _ god _ , Steve prayed that he’d get to keep this forever.

But Bucky doesn’t seem to remember anything. If he does, then he isn’t saying anything, and maybe it’s just that Bucky can’t bring himself to love someone so quickly, so earnestly, so perfectly made for him like Steve was,  _ is _ , he likes to tell himself.

But he knows he’s just shitting himself.

He gets the call one day while he’s on his morning jog, Sam behind him some ways back, but he catches up easily as Steve slows and slows and suddenly stops, going grey like the lead in his heart and the cement in the soles of his shoes with the weight of Natasha’s words.

He hangs up.

He tries to speak, but all comes out is some sort of broken choked sob, and Sam puts a hand on Steve’s back and says, gently, “You alright, man?”

Steve shakes his head, feeling himself sink to his knees on the asphalt; Sam follows like the good friend he is and doesn’t say a word, waiting patiently.

“HYDRA -” Steve finally manages to croak. “Rogue - Bucky - didn’t see him - gunshot - didn’t hear ‘em in time -” He inhales sharply, lets it out with the shuddering of his chest and a deep sob, “dead.”

Sam gets the gist of it. He reaches out to wrap his arms around Steve.

Steve breathes faster and faster even with Sam’s soothing shushes, “Shh, shh, I know, I know…”

His eyes roll into the back of his head and he passes out.

In the hospital, when he wakes up, Sam’s by his bedside, watching him with sad eyes.

He asks what year it is.

“2018.”

He takes a deep breath and blinks back his tears; he’s not sure of what’s real yet, he can’t remember. So he’s still got hope that he was just dreaming…

“Where’s Bucky?”

Sam’s mouth twists into some sort of pained, sad half-smile.

He shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”

Steve doesn’t even cry. He just stares straight ahead at the blank white wall, whispers, “I never even told him I loved him.”

Sam reaches out to touch him.

That’s when Steve throws his head back, squeezes his eyes shut, and screams.

Sam’s never heard anything more heartbroken in his life.

(Steve dies, officially, of a gaping wound left in his side by some jackass they fight about a month after Bucky really, truly dies.

Unofficially, Steve Rogers dies of a broken heart.

Captain America?

Oh, he died so long ago almost nobody can even remember his name.

Sam is the one who gets both the captain and his sergeant’s ashes.

He travels to Europe, takes a train through the mountains, and pours them into the valley where both his best friends’ lives ended.)

__

_ will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful? will you still love me when I’ve got nothing but my aching soul? I know you will. _ _ _

 

**38.**

_ breathing in the snowflakes. burnt lungs, sour taste. _

__

Sam should not care so much about the damned homeless boy in his living room.

The tin-boned, blue-eyed, freckled, caramel-haired angel sitting in his living room, borrowed grey pajamas and no shoes, reading a book with those fucking gigantic white wings tucked neatly behind him.

Sam should  _ really  _ not care so much about the damned homeless boy in his living room.

But he does.

“Maddy,” he calls from the kitchen, voice cracking, and immediately the angel stands and makes his way into the room, being careful not to hit anything with his wings. His eyes are twinkling and his smile mild but real, and he says in that godforsaken soft as a lion’s mane voice of his, “Yes, Sammy?”

And god, if Sam doesn’t just wanna  _ die _ .

But that would be bad form. So instead he pushes it down, swallowing thickly, and rasps, “I’ve gotta go out for awhile. Come with me?”

Maddy nods and heads to get dressed, but over his shoulder, asks, “Why?” with an air of nonchalance that Sam knows is carefully played.

Sam looks down at his shaking fingers, silent until Maddy comes back and threads them with his own.

“Don’t -” he tries, then takes a deep breath, closing his eyes, and starts again - fuck, why does this man make him so nervous? “Don’t wanna leave you on your own.”

Maddy wrinkles his nose, but smiles. It’s adorable. Sam internally slaps himself.

“Why?”

There are a thousand different ways Sam could answer that question.

_ Because I don’t want you to die. _

_ Because I can’t live without you. _

_ Because I need you and want you in every sense of the words. _

_ Because I love you so goddamn much that my lungs can’t take it and I have a hard time breathing around you but at the same time you’re the breath in my lungs and my heart aches for you and really I just can’t. _

He goes with, “Because I’m acquainted with dangerous people and I don’t want them touching you.”

Revealing enough. Hides all he needs to hide.

Maddy smiles, shrugs, and stands up on his tiptoes to kiss Sam on the lips. Sam feels his cheeks pinken but ignores it; Maddy murmurs, “Thank you,” and tugs him towards the door.

The streets are too crowded for Sam to be comfortable, but he deals with it. The sun’s blinding. He wishes he’d brought his sunglasses.

Maddy seems delighted just to be out of the house, holding on tight to Sam’s hand and pointing at clouds and laughing loudly and freely and Sam loves him, he loves him, he loves him.

But he should’ve learned his lesson the first time he tried to be with an angel. Riley had fallen in love with him, and had paid the price for it. Sam shouldn’t be running the same risk with Maddy, when he knows exactly what’ll happen to this angel - and Maddy’s, just, so pure and innocent and  _ light _ and Sam can’t ruin him like he did Riley especially because Riley already came to him a little bit ruined, a little bit scarred, a little bit rough around the edges.

Except, when he finds the blinking red dot, it’s not Maddy it’s pointed at.

It’s Sam.

And he sees the sniper a second too late. He hears the gunshot a second too late. He feels Maddy’s wings unfurl a second too late, and then his angel’s fallen into his arms, chest turning red with the bullet lodged in it.

Sam lowers them both to the ground, ignoring the people shouting and clambering around them, touches his smiling angel’s cheek as Maddy’s eyes twinkle and glisten with tears and whispers, “My angel, my angel, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Maddy says back, voice hoarse. “I never would’ve fallen in love with you if I hadn’t known the consequences of it.”

Sam feels a tear slip down his cheek, “Why do you have to leave me? Every time, my angel leaves me.”

Maddy just smiles. Presses a hand over Sam’s heart.

“I’m right here, Sammy. Don’t take for granted that it’s still beating.”

“Broken hearts don’t beat,” Sam half-sobs, half-chokes, and Maddy’s eyes start to dim.

“Sure they do, Sammy. Sure they do.”

Then he shimmers gold and disappears into bright white light, and Sam is left cradling nothing on the street but empty air, and that’s where Steve finds him as the cops are too afraid to try and move him.

“Come on, buddy. Let’s go home.”

Sam follows blindly. “I don’t know where that is anymore.”

Steve is silent. He knows the feeling.

Sam can’t breathe.

__

_ it’s too cold outside for angels to die. _ _ _

 

**39.**

_ you’re dancing in your bare feet. grab your hand and we’re chasing the train. on my heart where you’re resting your head. and you just look so beautiful, just like you were an angel. _

__

They know what they’re doing is illegal. That what they are is wrong in the eyes of so many people. That their tangled fingers can get them killed; well. The difference between them and other fairies is that they can’t bring themselves to care.

They keep their kisses in the dark, sure, are as careful as any others, but they won’t give each other up. Can’t give each other away. Can’t live without the promise of their lips to only one another and that when they go off to this war, each in their own respective times, that they’ll either both return or both die trying.

So Steve wakes up in Bucky’s arms for the millionth time and groans as it all comes rushing back, the alcohol and the making love and the whispered confessions in between kisses when they’d given each other - sorry, given  _ Steve _ time to catch his breath.

He shakes Bucky awake and Bucky starts pressing butterfly kisses up Steve’s chest and collarbone as he comes to, letting his eyes open slowly and humming  _ Have I Lately Told You That I Love You?  _ under his breath, and when he finally does show those piercing blue orbs he’s grinning up at Steve with as much love and adoration as possible, “Mornin’, Stevie.”

Steve’s not even standing, but he feels himself go weak in the knees. The blush creeps up his neck and he leans down to kiss Bucky, just to shut him up, and that’s when they realize their window’s open as they hear an old lady screech, “Fags!”

They turn their heads - caught naked in the same bed and kissing, there’s no way they can get out of that - and stare as she continues to raise hell from the earth with her words, “Fags! Fags on my street, fags in my building, fags in my home, you devils, god hates y’all! You fags get outta my city!”

Bucky bolts up and snaps the curtains shut, but not before they hear, “I’ll call the police on y’all, you hear me? They’ll beat Satan outta you or you’ll die for your crimes! Fags!”

Steve is trembling. Bucky’s quivering. With fear or with rage, neither of them know, but as soon as Bucky sits back down on the bed he has Steve wrapped in his arms and they’re both crying, kissing and whispering “I love you’s” against the skin of each other’s necks and they lock the door but it’s only ten minutes later that the police knock it down.

They’re still pressed flush against one another, eyes rimmed red and bloodshot and blown and their mouths crimson, and the officers surge forward like the shadows at night and grab them both, tearing them apart even as they scream each other’s names and reach desperately for one another, but alas, torn apart they are and torn apart they will always be.

“What’s your crime?” The policemen shout at them both, pressing loaded guns against the chests of these poor, shaking boys right over their hearts and they answer with whimpers, keep trying to take each other’s hands and never let go but the police make it impossible to hold on to each other for very long and they continue to cry, to plead, “I love him. I love him, I love him, I love, I’m not sorry, what crime is that? I love him…”

But the officers hear nothing but the convicting confessions of felons, and with cruel leers, they pull the triggers.

Both boys drop dead, and with them, any hopes or dreams of somehow, someday, an equal world.

__

_ cause maybe we’re just reckless kids. _ _ _

 

**40.**

_ if I told you, this was only gonna hurt, if I warned you, that the fire’s gonna burn. _

__

If Wanda Maximoff is anything, it’s loyal.

To a fault, almost. She could kill a million men in an instant, but her friends simply worry for her own safety, that she will die protecting one of them when they all know it should be them dying for her.

Except, first and foremost, Wanda Maximoff is loyal to her brother.

And so when the alien king, Thanos, comes to earth, and offers her a chance to bring him back, to save him, well, she simply cannot resist. He’d do the same for her, she knows; what she doesn’t know is that he wouldn’t want it. He’d want her to say no, to fight for the world rather than surrender to manipulating  _ lies _ of a greedy dictator for him, but he is not alive to tell her this and he was never around long enough for her to learn, for her to hear him think it.

But now, as her brother is resurrecting in front of her, his blank eyes coming into view, she can see that this is not who she paid her price for. This is not who she killed her friends for, who she handed over the world for, this is not her grinning, laughing, infectious teasing Pietro that she loves so goddamn much she nearly aches with it; no, this is a disappointed ghost of the same person.

And she holds his gaze for barely a moment, eager smile fading into a heartbroken expression when he starts to crumble back into dust and she cries his name ever so softly, then turns to Thanos with pleading eyes, “What happened?”

He smirks down at her, no sympathy at all, merely parlor tricks meant to fool a fractured little girl.

“Nothing, my dear,” he answers so plainly, but she can hear the mocking behind it. “He simply died, like he was always supposed to.”

She stumbles, catches herself on a weak railing. It’s better than falling off the building, she thinks, but only briefly, then wonders how freeing it would feel to jump.

“But - but - but you said -”

“I said I’d bring him back,” Thanos says, all sugary sweet and sneering cruelly. “Not that I’d keep him here.”

And she has no anger, the flames in her put out by the tears in her eyes, and she wails. As the only thing worse than losing someone the first time for good is finding you are mistaken only to lose them again; god, now she knows how Steve felt.

She crumples to her knees and topples over the railing, falling and apart at the seams; she doesn’t even have the chance to close her eyes before her skull cracks on the pavement.

It is indefinitely freeing, she finds, to jump.

__

_ do it all, in the name of love. _ _ _

 

 

**41.**

_ catholic school, vicious as roman rule. _

__

Steve can’t lose him.

Can’t lose his best friend, can’t lose the love of his life, can’t lose the only person he’s ever known.

He won’t.

He will  _ not _ lose Bucky Barnes, no matter how damaged and quiet he is after whatever the hell HYDRA did to him in Azzano. They’ve all got their scars, and that’s no reason to give up on each other.

“Bucky!” He screams, and his best friend reaches for him, but Steve can’t grab him, no matter how far he stretches, and then the bar breaks and Bucky’s screaming.

Steve doesn’t even hesitate.

“Steve, no!”

But Steve’s never followed orders too well.

So he leaps straight into the abyss after his only reason for living.

He slams into Bucky with the force of slamming brakes and feels his lover’s arms wrap immediately around him. He raises his head just enough to look Bucky in the eyes, those scared, wild eyes obscured slightly by the wind whipping their hair in their faces, and then Bucky whispers his name like a heartbroken plea.

“Stevie.”

He reaches up, cups Steve’s face in his hands and kisses him like it’s the last time he’ll ever get to, because it  _ is _ the last time he’ll ever get to and Steve kisses back with his eyes squeezed tightly shut because for once in his life he feels completely free, completely sure, completely unafraid and he doesn’t want to face the fact that it’ll be ending any second now.

“I love you,” he shouts over the whistling wind and snow falling in their eyes, not yet red with their blood but it will be, and Bucky smiles with tears glistening in his eyes; it’s so heartbreakingly final that Steve wants to cry.

If he thinks the world is ending than it’s nothing, but if Bucky, the embodiment of hope and Steve’s angel and the goodest man on earth thinks the world is ending, then the world is well and truly ending.

“I love you too,” Bucky says, half choking through a sob, and kisses Steve one last time before they hit the ground and everything goes black.

The last thing Steve hears is Bucky’s cry of pain, to what he doesn’t know, and Bucky hears nothing but Steve’s labored breathing, mouth open right next to his ear, blue lips kissing the brands on Bucky’s neck.

(America wins World War II two days later, and a search party is sent out for the bodies of Captain America and Sergeant Barnes.

Peggy Carter alone finds them, tangled together and buried in bloodred snow and rocks grey as the sky and the world without them in it.

What kills her is they look happier than they’ve ever been.

She leaves them there and makes sure nobody else finds them either.

_ They deserve this. If anything, they deserve this, _ she thinks as she treks away from them; to be happy is a man’s greatest sin.

She’ll gladly go to hell if it means she helped them commit it.)

__

_ love of mine, someday you will die, but I will be close behind. _ _ _

 

**42.**

_ I thought I saw the devil this morning, looking in the mirror, drop of rum on my tongue. with a warning. _

__

The boy dies ten minutes into surgery.

Tony’s half-brother, Steve and Bucky’s son, so much wrong with this damn picture that Tony wants to punch it; he can’t, no one actually took a photo. So his fist connects with Bruce’s jaw instead.

Bruce never fights back. He can smell the rum on Tony’s lips as he leans down to kiss them, and no matter how many bruises litter his torso and cheekbones and limbs Bruce’ll never leave, because some of those bruises could be from Tony’s rough kisses, the ones that still mean I love you despite the fact that he’s become Tony’s personal punching bag.

God help him, he loves this man. And he’s a doctor, he can patch himself up well enough.

Now, Tony’s sitting on the couch clutching a bottle of alcohol in his hands and staring at a photo of Jaime in his shaking fingers; Bruce makes no sound as he walks over and gently pries the picture from his lover’s hands.

With nothing left to hold, they reach out and slap Bruce.

Bruce doesn’t move, except to reel back with the force of the hit. He’s not surprised; he’s used to it by now, if anything, and Tony just screams and lunges at the man he loves, knocking Bruce to the ground and hitting him repeatedly; fists, fingers, palms, whatever it takes to hurt this beautifully broken man, not nearly as shattered as Tony, never as shattered as Tony but still fractured, pieces missing.

Bruce never fights back, that’s true, too much a risk of turning green, but this time, he just goes limp halfway through and Tony collapses on top of him, crying and sobbing and becoming a mess of snot and tears.

And when he finally quiets down enough to whisper, “I love you,” so broken and truthful and sorry, he can hear nothing beneath his head, where Bruce’s heart is supposed to be.

(Not in Tony’s hands. Never in Tony’s hands.

He refused to take the gift. Always gave it back, always. Could never hurt Bruce like that, could never leave bruises in the shapes of fingerprints on his perfectly cracked heart, so real and red and beating.)

Beating.

But there’s nothing there at all.

Tony pitches himself off the Tower five minutes later.

(Bruce is watching him with sad eyes when he gets to heaven, mouth straight and unforgiving and unsmiling and Tony kisses him until both their lips are purple and red and maybe now the only things that’ll bruise are words, vain apologies and love confessions and the truth.

What is the truth, other than that they’re all broken, broken, broken and that everyone is wrong; wrong, wrong, twisted and wrong because children aren’t the hope of the future, they’re the end of it.

Jaime’s not here either.)

__

_ I’ll be good, I’ll be good. and I’ll love the world like I should. _ _ _

 

**43.**

_ I really need somebody to call my own. I wanna be somebody to someone. _

__

Sam didn’t mean to fall in love with Captain America.

Well, actually, he’s fallen in love with Steve Rogers. Screw the icon, the uniform, honestly. Sam just loves Steve.

And for awhile, he considers telling him. They’d be good for each other, their friendship proves that. But what stops him, every time, is the look on Steve’s face, that wistful, sad smile that shows that he’s got somebody at home, whether in a grave or in a hospital, and Sam knows that Steve Rogers is fiercely loyal to a fault and that he won’t move on from this person, at least not easily, and it’s only been three years out of the ice, so, he’s still mourning.

And Sam’s fine with that. He can wait. He has time.

Except, as it turns out, Steve Rogers and his partner have so much more.

Because they find Bucky Barnes, and though he’s broken and dangerous and forgetful beyond repair, Steve loves him like the day and night and like there’s no tomorrow or yesterday to look forward to at all, not without him. And Bucky is broken, breaking, dangerous and in danger, memory-less but he remembers Steve. And he won’t hurt Steve. And Steve makes him whole.

Much as Sam hates to admit it.

And goddamnit, why couldn’t Sam just be normal? Just fall in love with some dude who’ll never love him back and leave it at that? He’d love that. It’d be easier.

But  _ no _ , because then he falls in love with Barnes’ smiles and his wisecracks and his unrelenting positivity about the human race and his love for science and  _ goddamnit, Wilson, you’re an idiot. _

It’s not enough that he fell in love with Steve, now he’s gone and fallen in love with the one Steve’s in love with, and so that’s twice the pain. Quadruple the nights crying. Six times the days he can’t recognize the sun behind the hallucinations of Riley falling.

And Sam, Sam  _ wants _ . Deeply, and he burns with it, and he feels the fire eating his insides and he can’t breathe with the flames licking his skin and the smoke coaxing tears from his eyes and he’s coming apart at the seams but nobody notices.

He won’t let them. He can’t afford it.

At Steve and Bucky’s wedding in Wakanda, he’s the only outsider allowed to attend. T’Challa sees. A pitying look, a sad smile, and an offer of a spot in the security and secrecy of Wakanda as T’Challa’s husband, because they may not be in love but at least the panther can shield his friend from the world crumbling in his hands.

Sam accepts, though it’s not what he wants. He’d rather a friend than nothing at all.

But it’s not what he wants. It’s not what he wants. It’s not…

Sam wants a house. He wants a marriage, kids, maybe a dog or two and kisses at the door as he waves them off to work. He wants cuddling while watching movies and sleeping late on Sundays, picking devils up from school and waving hello to the neighbors he doesn’t like.

He wants a home.

He takes T’Challa’s hand and settles for a broken heart.

(Only the strongest of men can even live with one.)

__

_ I don’t wanna die or fade away. I just wanna be someone. _ _ _

 

**44.**

_ you didn’t mean to fall in love. I never meant to hurt you. we never meant for it to mean this much. hush, hush, now. _

__

He practically  _ lives _ annihilation.

Wanda can smell it, see it, hear it; she can feel his desires coursing through her veins. He breathes greed, and she knows exactly what he wants - her home, her earth, her universe. She thought Stark was bad, but he’s nothing compared to Ultron and this monster of a person he’s made.

He wakes up suddenly, eyes opening faster than the speed of light and he blasts the lid off the glass coffin, knocking Pietro against the wall and rendering him unconscious; Wanda scrambles to her feet from the floor where she’s dived and rushes to her brother’s side, waving her hands in his face, trying desperately to revive him.

It’s no use, and now the creature she’s helped Ultron create is standing, facing them all with a cold glower of hatred; Wanda shivers and nestles closer to her brother.

“Which one of you is Ultron?”

The thing’s voice is gritty and unkind; Wanda hates herself for having the fleeting thought that he’s handsome. Ultron answers the question.

“I am.”

As the monster drifts - yes, he’s floating. Strange, isn’t it - over to Ultron, he passes the twins and catches Wanda’s eye; there’s a cruel twinkle in them and he smirks, as if he knows her deepest secret and is about to humiliate her with it, but no, instead he simply turns and stares Ultron in the eyes.

“What will you have me do, Master?” He asks. “What can I do to help you find your peace?”

Pietro begins to stir in her arms, and Wanda whispers in his ear for him to stay quiet with his eyes closed, and Ultron sounds distant, detached when he answers.

“Destroy the  _ world _ for me, Vision,” so the thing does have a name, “ _ cleanse _ it.”

Vision bows his head, turns to Wanda, and faces his palm towards her. Pietro “wakes up” at this point and curls himself around her protectively, but she knows it will do no good. She kisses her brother’s hair and to the creature says lowly, “We have done nothing to wrong you.”

Vision’s sneer is mocking, amused. “And yet you have offended  _ him _ ,” he speaks of his master indulgently, “if not by mere existence and for that you must  _ pay _ .”

Pietro growls. “Do not touch her, you traitorous scum -”

“Oh, but I was never on your side at all!” Vision taunts, and that’s when Ultron reaches the end of his patience, “Vision! Do it!”

Vision doesn’t even spare his master a glance as his hands light up, obscuring his evil grin; he lives annihilation, she can smell it, see it, hear it now, his sickness.

And now he will infect them too. (What a fool she was to think he would be kind and kill them.)

“As you wish.”

(She can still read minds, but she can no longer hear her own.)

__

_ so go on, live your life. so go on, and say goodbye! so many questions but I won’t ask why. maybe someday but not tonight. hush, hush, now. _ _ _

 

**45.**

_ look at where we are. look at where we started. I know I don’t deserve you, but hear me out, that would be enough. _

__

Bucky’s being stupid, crying as much as he is. They always knew it was gonna happen, it was always an inevitability rather than a small chance or a “maybe always”.

And they’ve lived while they could! He’s kissed Steve more times than he probably ever should’ve, stealing most likely twenty years of his breath, and he’s loved him more than any dame ever could and patched him up more times than Steve’s saved some poor girl in an alley.

They’ve laughed, they’ve loved, they’ve lived; so then why does he feel like his world is ending? He’s got no regrets.

Except for his Stevie, lying cold and still and dead beneath the covers in their bed now, his hand held in Bucky’s as the latter sobs his heart and soul out onto the creaking wood floor; they’re both broken anyway, so it’s not like he’s losing much.

“I miss you,” he cries, “I miss you,” and it’s only been five minutes; god, imagine what the rest of his life is gonna be like if this is how it is now.

He doesn’t really get to find out.

He doesn’t kill himself, god no, because Steve would hate that and Bucky’s just trying to get by, through each day one at a time, living each second and exhaling each breath for Steve.

But there’s a war, and his draft letter comes, and he gets shipped off to the 107th and gets captured with them all and loses himself on Zola’s table to syringes full of a serum that would’ve made his lover better, if he’d survived.

Five months later and he doesn’t remember his own name, let alone feelings or people or language.

Twenty-four dead people and seventy-three years later, a group of enhanced individuals challenge HYDRA’s grip on the world, the Soldier receives a new mission.

By the end of it (five bullets gone. What a waste, he can’t help but think), there’re two dead spies tangled together at his feet, a god unconscious and buried in the rubble, a doctor twisted and broken in a crater and an infamous inventor shredded to pieces by his own armor. The blue light from his chest dimming down to nothing.

Dead and gone are the heroes of the world.

Bucky Barnes, still breathing, is as dead as they come.

(If he’d been able to think, able to remember, able to feel, he would regret not stabbing himself seventeen and one times over his and Steve’s apartment those five minutes after, feeling numb with longing and benign to anything physical like wounds or a sharp knife, picturing him and his lover kissing at daybreak with Steve sweating and hot as a furnace beneath him and Bucky would feel rusted, red with love and orange with sunlight and peeling with moans as he was loved, is loved, is loving because Bucky wouldn’t need a homecoming as he’s already home.

Steve would’ve wanted him to kill himself rather than live this; the Soldier dreams of a man who looks just like himself falling from a freight car and feels a strange envy towards him, though he cannot remember a thing.)

__

_ there are moments that the words don’t reach. there is suffering too terrible to name. there are moments when you’re in so deep, it feels easier to just swim down. learn to live with the unimaginable. _ _ _

 

**46.**

_ some people long for a life that is simple and planned. _

__

He’s only just met her but she’s beautiful, all dark skin and blac cornrows and gold and gems and deep eyes, and he’s only just met her but he feels drawn to the way her sharp cheekbones rise when she smiles and he kisses her like she’s everything and, honestly, she is.

“I’m Asekia,” she tells him, “from Wakanda,” and he kisses her again and then takes her hand and pulls her out from under the building they’ve been standing in just in time to watch it crumble, and despite the fact that she could’ve been buried under there and somebody else now probably is, Asekia laughs.

“It’s glorious!” She shouts towards the sky. “Unbelievable, that I woke up this morning thinking I’d find sugar in my coffee and instead I find a cheetah boy who kisses like a lion and my home up in the air!”

He wants to tell her off, say it’s his home too and she should be worried about other people and not to call him  _ cheetah boy _ , but instead he’s in wonder of her words, of her happiness, of her smile; she’s bewitched him better than his sister.

But still, they’ll both die if they don’t  _ move _ , and move  _ now _ , so he grabs her hand again from where it’s fallen to her side and pulls her along as fast as he can, towards the edge of the city, and he sees the heroes running, flying, leaping and he’s about to follow when he sees her, and she’s grinning at the ground, obscured partly by clouds; she shouts his name, “Cheetah boy, come on!” then lets go of his hand and jumps.

He dives after her almost immediately, no more hesitation than the widening of his eyes as he sees what she’s done, and he catches her in his arms halfway down the fall and she smiles up at him with an excitement that he thinks perhaps he could never match and whispers, “Look up. Isn’t it beautiful?”

And he does, “My name’s Pietro,” because if he’s gonna die he wants her to at least  _ know _ , and then they land; her gracefully on her feet and him grasping her tightly, fingernails digging into her skin as he tries to catch himself, get his balance, maybe just  _ not trip _ .

She helps him. Smiles up at him, kisses him again, then points her face towards the sky an murmurs, “It is a  _ wonder _ .”

His arms around her, he agrees, and then the wonder of Sokovia comes crashing down and he barely has time to tell her he loves her before he can see nothing, nothing, except his sister’s grief and Asekia’s eyes.

He may have been a cheetah boy, but he never could’ve been fast enough to outrun his death.

No, because he ran straight to her, and she’s still beside him now.

(He never knew that death could die.)

__

_ hand in my hand and you promise to never let go. _ ****

 

**47.**

_ I tell myself you don’t mean a thing. and what we got, got no hold on me. I tell myself I don’t care that much. but I feel like I die til I feel your touch. _

__

They didn’t mean to fall in love.

That wasn’t the plan, that was never the plan; the plan was for Tony to marry Pepper and Steve to be with Bucky, who despite everything he feels for Tony he’s still insanely in love with, will always be in love with, can never  _ not _ be in love with.

But that’s not how it turned out, and now Steve’s staring into those dark eyes he used to hate so much that are now filled with hatred towards him and he can’t pretend anymore that all the blue in his eyes is simply his pupils.

“He’s my friend,” he pants, the simplest truth there is, on his knees in front of the second man he loves, ever so subtly placed in front of the first. And if Barnes wasn’t unconscious then he’d probably cry at that, because Steve and him have never been  _ friends _ .

But Tony knows exactly what that means. Steve Rogers has never had any friends, not before Bucky and not after, and so all he’s in love with is the only people who have ever paid him - not Captain America, but Steve Rogers. The boy who went to hell and back and started out at five feet and ninety pounds and couldn’t run away from a fight. Steve Rogers, the boy who Bucky Barnes found worth in and then fell so crazy in love with that they ruined their chances of ever loving anybody else again - any attention.

“So was I,” he rebuffs, smooth and cold and harsh, and Steve feels the sting all the way down to his toes; feels Bucky’s fingers twitch and curl around his, his whisper for, “Stevie,” and he feels Tony’s betrayed gaze on him and tries to do what he’s always done : what’s right.

(But a man who’s torn into himself can’t tell what’s right, too busy looking right and left in fear that he’ll be found out, caught for such a sin as love.

And caught red-handed, he has been indeed.)

“I love him,” he says, so soft and broken and it’s the  _ truth _ , it really is, but it’s not enough. Not enough for the man who Steve Rogers didn’t choose.

“You love me too,” Tony whispers, all the fight having gone out of him, nothing left to say; he’s dead on his feet, out of hope and out of anger. “So why am I not enough for you?”

Steve averts his eyes, tightens his fingers around his lover, motionless behind him, and, for once in his life, shies away.

And that’s Tony’s answer.

“You love me,” he breathes, in disbelief and hurt and a million other emotions that shutter fleetingly across his face, “but you love him more.”

Steve stands then, tall and strong and yet the weakest Tony’s ever seen him; he’s defeated. And he kisses Tony like he means it, like maybe in another life they could’ve made it, and against his lips, tells Tony the only thing he’s ever known not to say.

“I’m sorry.”

And then he’s gone, back to saving Bucky and protecting Bucky and keeping Bucky alive and in as good of health as a brainwashed amnesic ex-assassin can be and Tony watches them go, their silhouettes pressed together like puzzle pieces.

Because they’re the soulmates in this story, they’re the ones who get the happy ending. Tony’s the villain, or a background character at the very least.

Steve’s shield is on the ground next to him. Tony picks it up and turns it over in his hands, then turns and walks away.

There are better things to love than a broken clock.

__

_ only love can hurt like this. _ _ _

 

**48.**

_ I woke up in somebody’s arms, strange yet so familiar, like nothing could go wrong. barely alive or nearly dead, somehow awake in my own bed, and there you are! _

__

Sam has a bad habit of letting the world’s most wanted into his house.

Even those he has personal problems with.

Like Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, unable to remember a thing besides his own name and a golden-haired angel that he killed last week, and Sam watches as the man stares at the coffee in his hands blankly like if he watches its surface long enough, the answers to all the earth’s predicaments will be written there in black ink.

And Sam is suddenly filled with an anger he’s never felt, a madness crawling up inside him and clawing at his heart, a grief that he hasn’t been able to express over his best friend’s death over fear of someone finding his best friend’s murderer in his living room.

And he breaks, like all good men do.

“You killed him,” he snarls, low and furious, and somehow more terrifying than any amount of shouting could ever be, and it only fuels his fury when Bucky doesn’t look up. Doesn’t move. Just stares down at his coffee.

“You killed him!” He yells, hysterical, the tears starting to slip from where they’ve been pent-up in his eyes and down his cheeks. “You murdered the man you loved in cold blood, my best friend, my only friend, just like Riley all over again! You’re a monster, that’s what you are! You know that, right? I mean, what kind of man…”

His voice cracks and he whispers the rest, “What kind of man kills his own best friend?”

And then he sees the drops start to fall into Barnes’ coffee, rippling the surface like the wind or skipping stones, his hair shielding his face but not his back, which is shaking, and that’s when Sam realizes he’s crying.

“A man who doesn’t deserve to be called one,” Bucky answers, and it comes out so broken and guilty and hopeless that Sam can’t help but pity him. He crosses the room and kneels down in front of his best friend’s killer, the man he hates with a passion, and looks up into his wet eyes.

“What kind of man am I looking at?” He asks softly, hands on Bucky’s knees, and Bucky’s lip quivers and he cries harder; his response comes out unsure and high-pitched.

“Am I one?” He squeaks, and Sam gently pries his coffee cup from both metal and flesh fingers, then reaches up and takes Bucky’s face in his hands.

“A better one than most.”

And Bucky Barnes dissolves into tears, great heaving sobs and fractured sentences; Sam wraps his arms around the man’s neck and pulls him down to the floor, cradling him against his chest, and Bucky claws at his shirt.

“I miss him,” he bawls. “I miss Stevie.”

Sam combs his fingers through Barnes’ hair and shushes him, “Shh, shh, I know, me too…”

“I’m not a man,” Bucky cries, “I’m a monster,” and Sam kisses his head, holding him tighter.

“You’re not,” he murmurs. “Whoever told you you are is.”

Bucky quiets, sniffling, and his voice is muffled by Sam’s shirt as he curls deeper into the black man’s arms, “You’re not. You’re not. You’re… nice.”

Sam feels a wetness on his cheeks and presses his face into Bucky’s hair. “What kind of men are we?”  
And Bucky’s answer is soft, almost unspoken - “Broken ones.”

__

_ I was shot down by your love, my angel in blue jeans. _ _ _

 

**49.**

_ were both by his side when he died. death doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints, it takes and it takes and it takes. he may have been the first one to die but I’m the one who paid for it. I survived but I paid for it. _

__

Love is like painkillers.

It makes you feel strong, happy, better than you were before and so you become addicted to the source of this - that person. And then, one day, you overdose, because you give too much love and they can take too little and so you end up alive but numb, in withdrawal.

But no amount of this person, or painkillers, is gonna numb the pain they’re the cause of.

And now Bucky’s overdosed.

Steve, his Stevie, fighting like mad against Tony, his Tony, and Bucky doesn’t know how they managed to fall so insanely in love that it’s destroying them now.

But the point is, he’s watching the men he loves most in the world try to murder each other, and Buck doesn’t even know the cause of it, can’t even guess. He’s got no idea, and he opens his mouth and screams for them to stop, stop, this isn’t going to help and they’re tearing him apart but his voice is cracking and hoarse and he’s crying.

They can’t hear him through their shouts of rage, too busy ripping at one another’s hearts to realize the third they’re breaking.

But they can hear the gunshot.

And that’s when Steve finally sees the death of his best friend, and Tony finally realizes the full extent of his affect, and Steve’s the first to crumble, down on his knees beside his lover and screaming, sobbing and crying and clawing at Bucky’s chest, falling apart over this broken man, now a broken man himself.

Tony then sinks down beside the captain, draping himself over both the sobbing man and the dead one, and kisses the side of Steve’s head, just above his ear, and he whispers something that he thinks will make it better.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

But Steve just wails, the sound of his heart severing into two fractured pieces, and Tony pulls him into his arms, kissing his hair and trying to balance as Steve sags against him, cries and grasps at his second lover, unable to tear his eyes from the first one.

“I could’ve,” Steve croaks, “I could’ve, could’ve saved him. Should’ve saved him, like I was always supposed to… he’s dead, dead, dead and gone because of me… for good this time…”

Tony shushes him with his mouth on his, soft and wet and mournful, and he whispers, “My fault, Steve. Not yours. Never yours. I started this. I ended him.”

But still, Steve cries, “I should’ve saved him. Could’ve saved him, should’ve saved him…”

And as they shatter, fall to pieces on this cement and try desperately to warm each other in the midst of this cold, Tony whispers, “I love you. I know you loved him. I loved him… loved him same as you…”

“Love him,” Steve corrects, sobbing, but it’s no use. Words can’t fix actions, and now it’s done, what can’t be undone.

No amount of medicine could ever cure this.

__

_ my love, take your time. I’ll see you on the other side. raise a glass to freedom… wait! _ _ _

 

**50.**

_ and baby, for you, I would fall from grace, just to touch your face. if you walk away, I’d beg you on my knees to stay. _

__

“James Buchanan Barnes.”

“I’m sorry -”

Steve doesn’t stick around to hear the rest. Peggy and Howard take him to the enemy lines, drop him in, don’t wish him luck or tell him to come back alive because they know not to be fools with hope. There’s a limited amount of that, and it can’t be wasted on disobedience for loved ones.

And he finds an abundance of soldiers. Frees them all. Asks anyone he can about Bucky, but goddamnit, nobody knows. It’s almost like he was never even here.

When that occurs to Steve, he panics. If Bucky’s not here, then where is he?

Then he’s distracted by a man who pulls him over to the side, whispers in his ear, “My sergeant’s missing. Barnes. Went to the medical - well, experimental ward. Try there, would you? We need him.”

Steve manages a quick nod and sprints in the direction the man’s pointing towards, down the halls and passing soldiers. It’s a blur, everything that happens, until suddenly he’s faced with Bucky on a table, staring straight ahead.

“Buck. Bucky.”

But those blue eyes he loves so much are blank, unrecognizing, and no matter how much Steve shakes him, he can’t wake his lover up.

“Please,” he whispers, bending over Bucky’s body and kissing the man incessantly but gently, “Please. Don’t leave me. Don’t…”

But there’s no use in trying to breathe for the dead. Once gone, they’re gone, and Steve learns this for the second time in his life, except this is worse than his mother. Worse than all those fevers he’s suffered through. Worse than the disappointment in Bucky’s eyes whenever he had to patch Steve up after a fight.

The disappointment that he wished gone so many times, the disappointment he kissed from Bucky’s face until no worry lines showed anymore, the disappointment that proved that he was loved.

The disappointment he’ll never see again.

Peggy and Howard are more than relieved when they see him return, grins taking over their faces as they run to him, only to find themselves staring into the face of someone they no longer know.

Steve Rogers comes back breathing, but a dead man.

__

_ don’t blame me, love made me crazy. if it doesn’t, you ain’t doing it right. _ _ _

 

 

**51.**

_ run like your life depends on it. let’s make forever in this moment. tell me you love me again, oh, again. and I would waste away without you. _

__

They both knew the risks.

It was in their vows, when they married - so was “death do them part”, but Clint’s ignoring that fact - that they knew the risks but would take them, if only to be with each other.

And he could see the melancholy in Natasha’s eyes, but goddamnit, he loved Laura as much as he loves his Tasha, nothing will ever change that.

But there are no words for this, no vows taken for this risk.

His kids are draped over their mother, bullet holes in all their heads, and when he came home to a silent house this was never what he thought he’d find.

He doesn’t even feel Natasha’s arms wrapping around him, hear her voice in his ear, whispering, “It wasn’t your fault. Come on, let’s go. Clint. Birdbrain. Baby, come on.”

“They’re gone,” he rasps; it’s all he can manage to say. He’s staring, right into his wife’s dark, blank eyes, and he reaches for his side holster and that’s when Natasha turns his head with her hands and kisses him.

It’s not their first kiss. There have been times, for missions or for comfort, when they were lonely or drunk, when one of them stopped breathing or came close to it. Sometimes just because they’d make the mistake of glancing over at each other for a second too long and her in his flannel shirt and him in his jeans and nothing else on the balcony and he’d swear by Laura it was an accident, but it was always an accident and there were many, many, many accidents.

“I love you’s”, too. Go big or go home, they say, but for them it’s the quiet moments, the times they’ve woken up in the same bed or the days one of them doesn’t want to eat or they run into someone they know on a mission and they cry after the kill, practically feeling the victims’ names etched into their skin as they’re branded into their brains.

The times they’ve caught the other rubbing their palms scarlet under hot water trying to wash off the blood that isn’t there.

But it’s never been his family’s blood.

Clint kisses back as hard as he can, pulling her against him and pouring every tear, every scar, every sleepless night that he’s bound to have from now in into this kiss, this one thread of a promise weaving them together.

And, and, dammit, he knows it’s wrong but he’s honest to god in love with her like the sun with the moon and he’ll follow her anywhere and so will she for him and they fuck each other senseless in his and his wife’s abandoned, creaking bed and afterwards he slumps against her, covered in sweat and tears and she tries to kiss away his sadness, telling him to sleep.

He wakes up in her arms, and by the light of the sunrise, he makes love to her and she cries when he whispers, “I love you,” because her mind it’s always just been pity but there’s no band on his finger this time, no wife and kids waiting for him in a broken home that he’ll return to half solely for duty and otherwise for love, but now he’s hers and hers completely, and she tells him it back, “I love you, I love you, I love -” and it starts all over again.

And they spend three days in this constant cycle, never going downstairs, starving and thirsting away until finally they need nourishment and so they go sit at the dirty kitchen table and eat and drink and never look to the bodies still lying on the floor.

Natasha waits at the door while he kisses each of the corpses goodbye, murmurs against their foreheads those three lethal words, and when he comes out there’s a lump in his throat and tears dripping down his face and collecting at his chin still but she never mentions it and instead kisses him and tells him that she loves him and they walk to the jet, fingers intertwined, and she throws behind her a match to light up the house, and it burns so beautifully against the blue sky.

“What do you want to do?” She asks him, and she’s looking at him like she’d do anything so long as he asked and he knows she would and he hates himself for what he’s about to ask her, but neither of them are strangers to abusing power; they’ve done it before and they’ll do it now.

“I want to avenge them,” he answers honestly, and for such painful, angry words, loaded with the doom of a life of red bathroom sinks and running water, they are spoken much too soft, but she just nods like almost nothing’s amiss and off they go.

So many dead. So much more blood. And when they wash their hands, red flecks still show up and stain the water like rust and neither of them regrets a single murder.

But they are fugitives now. And all fugitives are eventually caught, and so now they’re on their knees, bound by handcuffs - such mediocre and funny little playthings - with their former friends staring down at them, but none of them recognize each other.

“I love you,” Natasha whispers to him as they inject her with some sort of blue liquid, and he stretches his wrist restraints just enough to grasp her fingers, holding on tight as her eyelids droop and she starts to drift off; he’s not an idiot, he knows she won’t wake up.

“I love you,” he tells her, so soft and sure. “I loved you then and I love you now. And I’ll love you wherever we’re going.”

She doesn’t answer, her chest stops rising, and his eyes are on her last peaceful expression when they put the bullet in his head.

__

_ we’ll be outlaws, you and me. _ _ _

 

**52.**

_ and when the angels call me a fool for giving all my grace up for you, I won’t look back, but when they ask, who did you love? _

__

Steve is a dumbass.

Granted, Bucky knew this before said dumbass even showed up here, standing above him with those beautiful blue eyes that look like safety and relief, but still, the point stands.

Steve is a fucking dumbass.

But Bucky’s been following that dumbass for fifteen years, has fallen so deeply in love with this man touching his face and shaking him that it’s not even funny.

“I thought you were dead,” says his ever-so-eloquent dumbass, and Bucky wants to say,  _ I’m not? I thought you were an angel,  _ but he won’t. He’s not the same man that Steve said goodbye to in New York, the one who flirted with anything that breathed or the one who kissed his Stevie when drunk and the next day called it pity or the one who knew how to fake a smile.

“I thought you were smaller,” he goes for, because it’s true, and then it really sinks in and he thinks,  _ God, Stevie, what they do to you? To your pretty body, your innocent soul? _

But when Steve kisses him, relief painting his features and grin tasting like cigar smoke, Bucky can’t help but melt into it; no matter what this man looks like, bruised and battered or clean and shining, he’ll love him the same.

“Did it hurt?” He asks, limping behind Steve, trying desperately to hide his worry, his pain, because Steve can’t be concerned with him right now. But Steve looks back at him, smiles, and takes Bucky’s hand, helping him stay upright, and Bucky knows he could never deserve this man; the thought is not a new one.

“Little bit,” Steve answers, tucking Bucky under his arm like Bucky always used to do to him, and Bucky buries his face in Steve’s neck and kisses the skin there, accepts the lie and pushes down the urge to punch this new specimen in the stomach for being such a dumbass.

Again.

But then, they run into the red man and he hopes and prays to whoever the hell may be up there (he doesn’t believe in God, no matter how much his Stevie does, because “God” has never done anything for him so how could Bucky praise his name?) that Steve won’t turn into something like that as a result of whatever serum-y thingy they put inside him.

And then, he’s over on the other side, has crossed the line into the safest place they can find in a collapsing building, but then the bridge falls and Steve isn’t with him.

“Go on, get outta here!” Steve shouts at him. Goddamn this selfless bastard, Bucky thinks, this fucking punk who expects me to leave him alone to die here.

Dumbass.

“No!” He screams. “Not without you!”

And he may be Bucky Barnes, the one who breaks Steve’s heart as quickly as he mends it and is careful with his promises and doesn’t give away his kisses and plays with dames and their panties in dark alleyways but he’ll be damned if he becomes the Bucky Barnes who leaves Steve Rogers behind.

He won’t. He can’t. He couldn’t.

In no universe that exists could he let Steve go.

And Steve, history’s most notable dumbass, tries to jump. Leaps across the raveen, over the fire and fury below him, and Bucky almost thinks he’s going to make it but then comes the explosion and down Steve drops, completely silent, but Bucky won’t be. He isn’t.

“Stevie!” He screams, and hesitates not a fraction of second before diving down into the hellish abyss after the dumbass punk he loves.

He rams into Steve, who catches Bucky securely in his arms; he stares at Bucky with those wide blue eyes that are half thankful and half  _ oh my god why would you do that I came here to save you  _ but they both know that without the other there’s no way in hell to save either of them.

Bucky’s sure he looks the same, scared and undone and regretful, but not of Steve. Never of Steve.

“Dumbass,” he whispers, and kisses him, wrapping his arms around Steve right before they hit the ground; “End a the line,” he gasps as all his bones shatter and they reach it.

__

_ let it be me. _ _ _

 

**53.**

_ I saved every letter you wrote to me. from the moment I read them, I knew you were mine. you said you were mine. I thought you were mine. _

__

Bucky doesn’t remember much. He’ll admit that. But all this hope Steve’s pinning on him, it’s suffocating - Bucky remembers what’s important. And a lot of what’s important can’t be shared with Steve, because it would endanger him, and Bucky can’t have that. Could never have that.

But he remembers his mouth against Steve’s with the taste of whiskey and salty tears on his tongue. He remembers getting his draft letter, and how that was the first and last time he and Steve ever made love, with the sun setting and shedding golden light through the windows and spilling onto the floorboards. He remembers Peggy’s red smile, her sparkling eyes, and how the moment Bucky saw her, he’d known he’d lost Steve, for good this time.

And he remembers Maria.

Maria, his sweet little детка, with her wide brown eyes and blushing cheeks and dimples when she smiled, and he misses her, misses her like she’s the air he breathes.

But now he might see her again.

The thought has his heart racing, his lips stretching into a grin, and Steve keeps glancing over at him, so Bucky can tell he’s worried, but Bucky is just jittery with excitement at the thought of seeing his daughter again. So excited, it seems, that his fear and conscience has faded enough - he leans over and kisses the frown off Steve’s face.

When Bucky pulls away, Steve blinks, surprised, but then draws his best friend back in, pressed flush together, and they sway for a moment in each other’s arms before suddenly they’re here, and it’s all a blur after that until Tony’s there and they’re all walking into the large holding room together.

And that’s when he sees her.

He knows Steve will never quite understand why he runs, towards the last tank on the left, pressing the button that opens the case even before Zemo does and rushes up inside it, but it doesn’t matter.

It’s Maria, alright. His детка, asleep with her dark curls framing her face, and Bucky gently reaches out with his metal hand, the one she always used to play with whenever he was able to sneak into her cell and hold her while she slept, and touches a finger to the bullet hole stained perfectly between her eyes.

“Don’t worry. They died in their sleep,” comes Zemo’s voice, and Bucky sees red.

There’s a haze of memories, now, a stream of them, everything he’s ever done with Maria and sacrificed to keep her alive and with him, and he’s tearing things apart and he hears glass breaking in the back of his mind and then his hands are around Zemo’s neck and his teeth are gritted as he strangles the life out of his daughter’s murderer, and he’s never wanted to remember any of the people he’s killed, but he wants to remember this.

Except just as Zemo’s eyes roll back into his head, Bucky feels hands on his shoulders, pulling him back, hears Steve’s voice in his ears, “Bucky. Buck. Come on, he’s not worth it, Bucky…”

But Bucky won’t hear it.

“He killed her,” he seethes, practically foaming at the mouth. “Murdered an innocent little girl, my little girl!”

His voice rises near the end and he lunges forward again, back towards Zemo with his hands outstretched and he hears Steve’s shout of his name before he’s being pinned to the ground, those heartbroken blue eyes above him, full pink lips moving, trying to say something, but Bucky can’t hear anything but Maria’s voice ringing in his ears.

“Папа!” She’d whisper whenever he got back from a mission and he’d be sitting in her cell, holding her between his legs as she curled up against him. “Папа, я пропустил тебя.” (daddy, daddy, I missed you)

But she’ll never say that again, because she’s gone now, and this time he’ll miss her, and he roars at Steve, the man he’s lost and loved for longer than he can even count at this point, “Let me go!”

And Steve, tears welling in those bright blue eyes, just whispers, “Never,” and kisses him.

And Bucky feels the knife as Steve buries it in his skin, screams as it tears through his muscle and hears Steve’s incessant, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” playing over and over again in his head like a bad aftertaste as the blade cuts across his neck and then he can hear nothing.

(Steve pulls out the little girl that Bucky seemed to know and curls her in Bucky’s arms, tangling them together, and Bucky’s face, though twisted in pain, seems to relax, and Steve kneels down next to them and places Bucky’s head in his lap, playing with his long hair as his tears fall into Bucky’s open eyes and he closes them, and he whispers, again and again, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Tony leaves them be. Steve drowns in his own tears. They clog his eyes and ears and nose and mouth until they pour onto the cement in an endless river and all he can see is blue, blue, blue like Bucky’s eyes.)

__

_ I hope that you burn. _ _ _

 

**54.**

_ over and over, the only truth. everything comes back to you. and I know it’s wrong that I can’t move on, but there’s something about you. _

__

It feels like it’s been years since they’ve really known each other. It hasn’t, just a few months, but Bucky’s so goddamned tired of reminding himself not to kiss Steve whenever the dumbass punk saves him. Again.

But then, he can’t. Not when Steve’s so blatantly enamored with Agent Carter; Peggy, he calls her, and when they get back to camp and everyone’s cheering Captain America’s name, she smiles at him and he smiles back at her and Bucky can’t look at them any longer without feeling like he’s invading on something private and so he looks away.

His lips quivers but he stills it, blinking back the tears until he can make it out of this crowd. He may be giving up on life, but he won’t give up his dignity. He still has that much at least.

Later, Steve finds him in the bar. Bucky feels like shit - his best friend’s so gone on that red-lipped dame that he didn’t even notice Bucky was gone for all of ten hours, missing from his side. It hurts.

But worse is that he knows he still loves him. That he’ll still follow Steve into the jaws of death even if it means that he dies along the way, because honestly he reached the end of the line a long time ago and at this point, he’s just waiting for Steve to get there so Bucky can finally stop  _ trying _ .

And when she comes in - god, it kills him, the way Steve’s eyes immediately leave him to see her, and he downs a shot of whiskey and says some stupid things to her and sticks around afterwards just to be dumb enough to ask Steve if he’ll marry her, just because he loves to torture himself, and he can practically feel his heart snap in two as Steve answers, “Yeah, I guess I will,” with that damn lovestruck smile that Bucky’s always wearing around him.

But at least it’s confirmation that Steve won’t care much when Bucky stops breathing - which is bound to be soon if his Stevie keeps destroying his heart like this. God, nobody tells you how love is more intoxicating and addictive than the nicotine of cigarettes.

He smokes that night. He can see Steve and Peggy’s silhouettes pressed together as they dance through the window. He bites down on his lip to keep from screaming all the ugly thoughts collecting in his head, one giant black storm cloud that rains down the blue tears from his eyes and later, the thunder and lightning with which he shouts at Steve about goddamn nothing, because the punk did goddamn nothing wrong but Bucky just can’t stand to see him so happy with someone who isn’t him.

But still, Bucky will follow.

And so now they’re on a train. Wind causing them both to cry - like when they used to chop onions in their small kitchen and Steve would sit on the edge of their tiny bathtub while Bucky patched him up, patted his skin and kissed his bruises, pretending to be his momma or maybe just his keeper but Steve couldn’t know the latter - and Bucky feels the snow bombarding his blushing cheeks and closes his eyes the second before he’s blasted out into the cold, open air.

Steve shouts his name and follows him. Inches out onto the flapping metal door, arm outstretched, trying to catch him, and Bucky tries reaching back, but his fingers are still curled, because how can you try to save yourself when you have only half the want to live?

And then, Bucky thinks of Steve’s blue eyes. Stares up into them as they fill with tears and squeeze shut for protection against the wind whipping in their faces and freezing their mouths closed so neither of them can speak any last rites or secrets at all.

And then, Bucky remembers Peggy’s red smile. Her ruby lips stretched into a mischievous grin around pearly white teeth, and to Bucky they looked like fangs come to suck all the blood out of his body like there’s anything left inside him in the first place but to Steve they look like the sweetest strawberries, starkly contrasting with the orange sunsets he and Bucky used to watch or the flame that ignites the cigarette held between Bucky’s yellow teeth every night.

And then, Bucky thinks of himself. Fighting so goddamn hard every day, to live, to breathe, to maybe not feel every single ounce of pain that Steve unknowingly adds to the burden he already carries on his shadowed shoulders, but Steve’s always been blind and therefore can’t see the ghosts in Bucky’s eyes, the broken mirror shards of his shattered heart that reflect Steve’s smile, always, every second, minute, hour of the day and Bucky suddenly can’t feel anything at all, nothing but a faint ache in his chest that now feels strangely empty.

And then, Bucky decides to give up.

(As in, he doesn’t fall.

He lets go.)

(Two weeks later, so does Steve.)

__

_ if the whole world was watching, I’d still dance with you. _ _ _

 

**55.**

_ I’m gonna bury these bones. I’m gonna write it in stone that you were my home, my home. _

__

Pietro, honestly, is not brave. He’s not courageous, or selfless, much less able to sacrifice himself for anybody but Wanda.

Wanda, god, she’s so much better than him. Braver, too. More powerful, more careful. Kinder. She’s everything he isn’t, the light to his dark, and he’s seen the way she looks at Vision and knows that soon enough, she’ll find love just like the heroes always do. He won’t.

But besides the point, Clint is like a father to him. Or, at least, he’s the closest Pietro’s ever going to get. And the white-haired boy  _ wants _ to save him, wants to dive in front of those nine rays of light the color of heaven’s clouds and gates and maybe die a hero or just a martyr but that would be enough and Wanda would hurt, would agonize, but she’d be alright, in the end. She’d have Vision and Clint and the others, in the end.

Except she won’t have Clint, because the golden rays have hit and now there’s nine holes in his chest and he whispers, “Tasha,” and Pietro rushes to his side and in the distance, he hears the Black Widow scream.

Clint stares up at Pietro, blank, who’s gasping at him as short little sobs escape his lips, and the tears fall down his cheeks onto Clint’s face, who sputters through his last breath and then his eyes glass over.

“I’m sorry,” Pietro sobs, chokes, and then Natasha’s hands are on his shoulders and chest and pulling him back; she takes his place by her lover’s side and screams, voice breaking halfway through every protest, “No!” and Pietro turns away, unable to bear it.

The red-haired woman is a ghost now, simply wisps of who she used to be - barely a month ago, it was only a month ago - and Pietro watches her traipse around in Clint’s old sweatshirts and drink too much coffee though she inevitably falls asleep with tearstains on her cheeks anyway.

That year, they find Jaime.

He’s so bright and lovely, loud and alive, and he spends hours with the broken Widow, learning ballet and silence. He seems to love her almost more than his fathers, but not quite.

And then, Pietro ages older. Watches as Jaime does too, and one day they’re reading in the shade of a tree. They glance over at one another and then Jaime’s in his lap, kissing Pietro like there’s nothing else in the world he wants to do, and Pietro fists his fingers in Jaime’s hair and keeps him flush against his chest with an arm around his waist, and it feels good. It feels right, sloppy, perfect in that way only messy things can be.

But that night, it all comes back to kill him with the wound in his head that just keeps reopening and bleeding out screams, and Jaime is awake next to him, facing away.

“Why me?” Pietro whispers. “I’m no hero.”

And Jaime doesn’t answer, doesn’t turn around, just moves the arm lying limp on top of himself and weaves his fingers through Pietro’s, murmurs, “I only have one real leg. Is that enough for you to run away?”

“That has nothing to do with -”

“I can’t save anybody either. I’m as helpless as you feel.”

Pietro lies down and rolls over to face the same way Jaime is, distangling their fingers and putting an arm around the boy from behind, nuzzling his face into Jaime’s neck.

Nothing else is said, but Pietro thinks,  _ I’m a murderer. _

(Not of Clint. Of Natasha.)

(Why Jaime loves him, Pietro will spend the rest of his short life wondering.)

(Why Pietro feels so guilty, has so many scars, shies away from the light and locks himself away from the world, Jaime will never know. Will never ask. Will never understand.

Will never care.)

(The truest love is never questioned.)

(If his dads taught him anything, it was that.)

__

_ I should’ve saved you. _ _ _

 

**56.**

_ if someone said three years from now you’d be long gone, I’d stand up and punch them out, cause they’re all wrong. I know better cause you said forever. _

__

Only a few months since he’s seen Bucky, or, at least, the Soldier, but here he is.

Breathing, flushed cheeks that seem somehow sunken into his face like the millions of graves with their names on them, reflected in his eyes, the victims of the Soldier, of HYDRA, and Bucky seems almost peaceful in this light.

Steve can feel his eyes start to wet.

He pushes down the sick feeling in his stomach, of seeing his love so freshly dead again, and turns away, dropping his shield to the floor with a clang and not even noticing, too focused on the wires in his hands as he fiddles with them, trying desperately yet carefully to wake Bucky, to raise the glass that separates him and Steve. There are sparks, but no connections, nor any movement, and Bucky’s state doesn’t change.

So long it’s been since they’ve loved.

Since he’s felt Bucky warm, wet mouth on his, a soft and reassuring kiss in the middle of war or right after a fight in one of those dark alleyways Bucky always hated finding him in. So long since Bucky’s whispered, “I love you,” against the soft skin of Steve’s collarbone, sucking purple bruises there as Steve moaned his pain and pleasure. Since Bucky’s smile fell as he laid eye on Peggy’s, the way she looked at Steve and the way Steve looked at her.

But all that’s the past now. Surely he can be forgiven.

But no. Because the glass isn’t lifting, and Steve’s given up on the wires and is banging against the tube’s bulletproof casing with his gloved, bloody fists now, but still it won’t break and so instead Steve does.

After everything he did to make HYDRA fall, to save Bucky from himself, to live in the name of love, he’s right back here, dying at the feet of his lover’s beaten body.

And Steve knows, that even if he woke Bucky now, there’d be this empty void in his eyes when he looked at Steve, this curious, blank, strange distance, because the miles between them are indeed to great for even Steve to run.

But god, he would try. For Bucky Barnes, he would try his goddamn hardest till he died on his feet and fell face first into the dirt, coughing up blood and spit. For Bucky Barnes, he’d do anything.

He’d give up his very soul.

And give up his soul he does, when Wanda Maximoff, the scarlet witch, finds him broken, sobbing on his knees beneath the Winter Soldier and she offers him a compromise - he surrender himself and his team, and she will make him forget.

He does, and so does she, and she puts fresh new memories in his head of his greatest ally, the Winter Soldier, and together they kill hundreds of new targets in the name of HYDRA and a “free world”.

(Steve does not remember killing his friends while they begged and pleaded his name. He does not remember his kisses with Bucky, those wonderful, quiet things they’d do in the dark of the early morning. He does not remember Wanda, and her sickening smile and the grace with which she ended him.)

(Steve doesn’t remember anything.)

__

_ I’ll keep you locked in my head until we meet again. and time makes it harder. I wish I could remember. my darling, who knew? _ _ _

 

**57.**

_ I’ll give you everything I have, I’ll teach you everything I know. I promise I’ll do better. I will always hold you close, but I will learn to let you go. I promise I’ll do better. _

__

No one tells you what love does to you.

Sure, when you’re eight and you want to watch  _ Bill Nye _ but end up getting stuck on  _ The Little Mermaid _ and its scientific impossibilities, and Bruce didn’t mean to get stuck on it but Eric was very pretty and then he felt his lips moving as he asked about that kiss - would Ariel ever get it? And his mother just smiled, and he could see the wrinkles by her brow, and maybe that was why she died only a few days later.

“One day you’ll meet somebody,” she had said to him, taking his tiny, shaking hands in hers, “and the first thing you’re gonna think is,  _ God, I love you _ , and that’s when you know. And they might take a while to look at you and think the same, but just know that they will.”

“And it’s okay if it’s a boy?” Bruce had asked smally, and his mother had grinned and nodded.

“Whatever makes you happy, darlin’.”

And when Bruce does meet that somebody, he’s loud and obnoxious and flashy and rich and keeps trying to undo Bruce’s careful work to keep the other guy under wraps and actually, the first thing Bruce thinks when he sees him is,  _ Ugh, it’s Tony Stark. _

But when Tony shakes his hand, “Finally someone who speaks English,” Bruce can see the twinkle in his eyes, drowned out as it may be by his sarcastic remarks, and he blushes.

And a few days later, when they’re in the lab together, he does think,  _ God, I love you _ , but it doesn’t scare him. And as soon as Bruce comes back after the battle, redressed and filthy, Tony tugs him forward with a fist in his shirt and presses their mouths together in an urgent kiss.

“Man,” Tony breathes when they pull away for air, “I thought I’d be stuck with  _ Light _ in my head forever.”

Bruce just smiles.

And yes, it is,  _ God, I love you _ , but nobody tells you about your child. Nobody tells you how to deal with them curling in on themselves and forgetting to love you and staring blankly off into space for hours and punching you when you try and snap them out of it. Nobody tells you how to feel when your child decides they simply can’t anymore, despite all your efforts to love them, and you find them in their bedroom hanging by the neck from a noose, and you crumple to the floor and cry.

After the Infinity War, they’re all different, Bruce knows that. And when Tony comes back with Peter Parker hunched under his arm, the boy’s eyes hollow and wandering, Bruce knows that they’ll have their work cut out for them, but also that Tony is still the same man he loves, just a bit below the surface and a little bit older.

But Peter Parker is not.

His aunt, well, she’d been crushed by a crumbling building and Peter never even gets to see her body, though a small funeral is held where they bury an empty coffin, and yes, he goes. And Bruce and Tony stand by him, on either side, casting each other worried glances across the void that is their child’s head.

And Peter is quiet. Curious, intelligent, kind and open and roughly portrayed by sleepless nights and endless tinkering and taking too much from Tony but he’s quiet, and they try and protect him from the demons within his own head.

_ ( _ He’s not the same boy, and they’re watching him deteriorate into nothing. But they don’t know the full extent of their child’s pain, yet, and that’s the worst thing because even though he never talks and even though he never cries and even though he’s never here, aren’t parents just supposed to  _ know _ ?)

(I guess not.)

Everybody tells you how to deal with that. How to love them through everything, how to make sure they know they are loved that much and more, how to keep them from talking to themselves by having them talk to you.

Nobody tells you how to deal with it when you’re unsuccessful.

It’s Bruce who finds them. Peter, eyes closed and dangling; Tony, crumpled on his knees before the swinging body of their son and staring absently at his hands, and Bruce gasps but keeps in the tears, if only for a moment, to kneel down next to his lover and turn Tony’s wrecked, open face towards him.

He opens his mouth to say something. But there are no words for this. There have never been any words for this.

Maybe that’s why nobody told you.

__

_ with every heartbeat I have left, I will defend your every breath and I’ll do better! and you are loved, you are loved, more than you know! _ _ _

 

**58.**

_ I wanna live with you even when we’re ghosts, cause you were always there for me when I needed you the most. I’m gonna love you till my lungs give out! and I promise til death do us a part. _

__

The blonde captain, she knows him. He’s the fearless one who died in 1945, only to be back now in the height of a century whose values he detests. It’s too sad, his tale, but that won’t stop her from playing with his mind just like the rest of them, if only to get back at Stark.

But his vision, what he sees when she calls forward his greatest wish, it is not at all what she expected. Perhaps, the war long over and no more lives lost; maybe him and that red-dressed woman, Peggy Carter, dancing with rings on their fingers and smiles etched permanently into their faces; even war and freedom unexplainably always won, no bloodlust alive in the foggy backs of people’s minds.

But no.

She watches as he grabs the hand of a man who owns eyes crazed with fear, and pulls him back into a train, whizzing through the wind and snow, and she sees the captain smash their lips together and the man melting into it. It is evidently not their first. And she hears their conversation, held in the soft lulls of whispers and wishful promises.

“Thanks, Stevie.”

“God, Buck, I thought I’d lost you. Never thank me for saving you, I’ll do it no matter what. I… I love you.”

And the words are said in earnest, with the utmost truth ringing in them, and the man, Buck, smiles with crinkles at the corners of his eyes and presses their mouths together again.

The memory - it is one, however changed - changes and suddenly it’s the captain and Buck, clutching each other as the red-skinned man lies vanquished on the floor and the plane dives straight down, supplies crashing all over the place, both men curled into a ball around one another and desperately trying to shield the other from the sliding objects.

And then, again, the vision changes and she sees them walking down the street, holding hands, watching the world as it passes by around them, and she hears the captain speak -

“God, it feels so free out here, Bucky.”

And the man smiles and hides it in the captain’s shoulder, kissing the skin there, and she sees that the man - Bucky, she guesses, not Buck - has a metal arm now, and that a ring glints on its fourth finger, and the same on the captain’s left made of flesh, and her eyes widen.

The captain shakes her hold on his head and she sees him crumble in front of her, on his knees and choking on his tears as he tries with a surprising amount of determination not to cry, but he’s unsuccessful and Wanda can do nothing but stare.

The others are screaming one another’s names, trying to talk over each other and figure out how to defeat her and her brother, and then she feels Pietro’s arm around her waist and they disappear in the blur that is him running.

She hears the captain’s voice above the rest, heartbreakingly fractured and agonizing, “Bucky!”

(It seems as if she has torn apart something unfixable.)

__

_ just say you won’t let go. _ _ _

 

**59.**

_ I walked through the door with you. it was cold. something about it felt like home, somehow, and I. _

__

He’s thinking of her, how proud she’d be, when the webs begin to break. The screams come more incessantly now, and it’s all he can do to block them out, as he pours all of his strength into pulling the boat back together, but in vain as every web he ties rips within seconds and he cannot help but let his eyelids droop.

The waves are not helping.

He’s about to just let go and fall asleep when he hears his name, called frantically in her perfectly panicked voice.

“Peter!”

His eyes snap open and he’s wide awake now. He whips his head towards the noise and sees her, hanging on for dear life to the side of the boat as her legs and body dangle, and then her fingers slip and she screeches as she falls.

“Merida!” He screams, and promptly forgets all about the hundreds of others he’s holding up and he dives for her.

In the background the boat creaks as both its halves begin to fall sideways but he can only see her and her wide, frightened blue eyes. They’re getting closer, closer and then his arm’s around her waist and she’s holding onto him for dear life but her eyes are still a frenzy of emotions - he sees sadness there now.

“Peter,” she whispers, and kisses him, “let me go. Save them.” He shakes his head, tries to hold on, but they’re falling with the boat he’s holding onto and she smiles sadly and pushes away.

He screams her name as she splashes down and disappears beneath the blue, and then he feels the sob begin to climb up his throat but he cannot let it loose because Iron Man’s there and Iron Man saves them all and nobody sees Spider-Man as he leaves and hides behind the rails of a lighthouse balcony.

Tony finds him, shouts at him, screams at him, and Peter tries to take it but he can’t breathe and suddenly Tony freezes and reaches out to touch Peter’s face and he realizes he’s crying.

Tony pulls the broken boy against his chest and holds him close, rocks him as he shatters, falls apart, and then he must have somehow fallen asleep, because he wakes up in his own bed.

Tony’s passed out in his desk chair, across from him, and Peter wanders out into the living room and on the couch, there’s a red-haired woman, piercing green eyes that follow his every move.

He knows the Black Widow when he sees her, “Hi, Natasha.”

She watches him, silently, as he gets himself tea and sits down on the floor in front of her, and he manages two seconds of looking up at her, so resembling of her daughter, before he breaks down in tears and drops his head onto her lap, and she combs her fingers through his hair and holds him.

She bends down, whispers in his ear, mends his black heart back to red.

“I forgive you.”

(But the hardest thing to do, he finds, is forgive himself.)

__

_ you call me up again just to break me like a promise! too casually cruel in the name of being honest! _ _ _

 

**60.**

_ where I told you to run so we’d both be free. _

__

What is he supposed to say?

I mean, he’s been tortured and brainwashed for years, taken apart piece by piece with lies and scalpels, and he’s got names etched permanently into his skin, of all the people he’s ripped apart - emotionally or physically; he sees  _ Tony Stark  _ blazoned clear as day on his flesh arm, a reminder that if you kill someone’s parents than no matter how many breaths the child has left you will still have their blood on your hands, and so Bucky has a million names on body.

Some show up years,  _ decades _ after a murder, because somebody’s child was ruined and killed because the person he strangled should’ve stopped it put they weren’t around to do it because he cut their life short, broke into the timeline and severed it from its destined path.

And now, he’s running down the highway at two in the morning, drawing no attention even as he is a half-naked man with dark scrawl covering almost every inch of his skin and he’s moving faster than a car on his feet down a busy street.

And all he can think is,  _ Stevie. _

But he never gets to say sorry. He never gets to ask if his best friend can still love him. He never gets to whisper against Steve’s lips all those broken promises he wrote to their Brooklyn apartment back during the war, never gets to risk, “I love you,” one last time before he goes and throws himself off a bridge -

Well, you were going to kill himself anyway, Natasha would say, is saying in his ear right down as he gasps through the blood that’s being coughed up with his spit and she’s shushing him and trying be gentle and she was his  _ sister _ , he took care of her, he tried to  _ save _ her, why is she betraying him in such a way now?

“Steve,” she murmurs, “for Steve. You broke him, he’s broken, I’m trying to mend him, maybe only you can mend him, it’s too late.”

Her words are swallowed by tears and she presses her forehead against his and the salty droplets fall into his eyes and he blinks them away and lifts a hand to brush her hair back, push his fingertips into the nape of her neck and he swallows and feels the circle of the gun pressed over his bulletwound and she sobs, “It’s too late.”

And Bucky thinks of the weight in those three words, as heavy as the words he used to whisper into Steve’s ear whenever he saw Peggy’s tight red smile, “I’ll be okay.”

The same words he used to say whenever he came home from work, after stopping by a bar or club and covered with alcohol and perfume and smelling of sex and Steve would curl his finger in Bucky’s hair and kiss him desperately, as if wishing to claim his body when they both always knew that no matter who was touching him physically, Bucky’s mind, soul, and heart would always belong to Steve, always be with Steve, but it’s too late for any of that now and to be honest, Bucky always knew his time with Steve would be short. That he wasn’t who Steve was meant to have forever with.

So the least he can do is give the love of his life a second chance at what Bucky never had, never will have, never can have.

“Protect him,” he whispers. “Tell him I’m sorry. And that I love him.”

Natasha lets loose a sob and nods, pressing a kiss to his forehead, and Bucky closes his eyes, lets his hand fall, feels his chest slow.

“Tell him it wasn’t his fault.”

(All these years later and still, Steve won’t believe it.)

__

_ where dead man called out for his love to flee. _ _ _

 

 

**61.**

_ I forgot to say out loud how beautiful you really are to me. I can’t live without. _

__

His mother used to ask him what love was. After his father started to disappear, to recoil, to fade into a ghost of himself, and Tony and his mom would sit on the piano bench, staring at the keys as if they held the answers to the universe, and his mother said, “Love.”

Breathed it, more like, and Tony looked up at her with those curious nine-year-old eyes and his mother’s own were twinkling and she whispered again, “Love.”

Tony cocked his head, “What about it, Mama?”

And she would say, “What is it?”

He’d turn away, stare off into the distance, answer, “Happiness, Mama. Sunshine.”

And he could never quite understand why his mom would tear up at that, touch his cheek so gently and smile and rasp, “Yes, baby. Love is happiness,” because she certainly never seemed happy and neither did his dad and weren’t your parents supposed to be in love?

Whatever the matter, he grew up and they died and he lived in constant wonder of machines, the only love in his life, he was certain, and then he met somebody who had love for simply science also.

Bruce Banner.

Kind, smart, sweet; he had a faint blush and a stocky build and gentle but rough fingers whenever he bandaged Tony’s fingers after an up-all-nighter and an exhaustive mistake. Deep dark eyes, curly brown hair, tan, dirty skin and pretty, so pretty, pink lips that shone with the light above them and the illumination of their faces by screens.

And now, Tony wakes up, wearing fuzzy pajamas and his face pressed against a warm chest and held still by a strong arm, and he looks up, bedhead and all, at the smiling Bruce Banner, who leans down to brush his lips against Tony’s forehead and whisper, “Hi.”

It’s just a word. It’s not three, it’s not said grandly, it’s just a simple word that is a greeting, but when you’re someone who’s only heard goodbye your whole life it sounds like angels singing and heaven opening its gates to you, at last.

“Hi, too,” Tony murmurs, and Bruce doesn’t ask; he already knows what he means.

(And he knows, that if his mother were to ask him now, “What is love, Tony?”

He’d answer, “Green.”)

__

_ I need you. I’m sorry. _ _ _

 

**62.**

_ you’re still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore. _

__

Miracles don’t happen to him.

Simple life fact about Sam Wilson - he just isn’t lucky. It’s not in cards for him to end up happy, for him to have friends, a family, a lover, it just doesn’t work out for him. He’s tried, really; there was Riley and Maria Hill and a lot of other people that he can’t remember who left notes on his kitchen table with their phone numbers (which he never called) and then there was Maddy.

Madison Nichols, resident medical prodigy, unusually skilled at saving his patients right before death. Strong, blue-eyed, thin-boned, smiling and brunette and open, trusting, and he showed Sam his wings and Sam slept in their embrace every night, with Maddy wrapped in his, and if this beautiful, wonderful  _ angel _ who caused miracles couldn’t be one to Sam, then he didn’t know what to think.

Except then, a doctor who saves life can hardly save his own, especially when shot three times in the chest on his own front porch, and Sam gets home to find his lover dead, staring blankly at the sky with a smile.

And now, he’s dressed in black pajamas with red hearts on them, white wings too, that Steve bought him so long ago, back before he met Maddy. When they were both still hurting, when Riley was gone and Bucky had disappeared and neither of them could handle themselves on their own.

And he’s sleeping, curled in the sheets that still smell like cinnamon and lavender and lemons, like Maddy, and his eyes are screwed tightly shut. It’s the closest he gets to sleep these days, too tired to do much of anything but lie there, staring at the ceiling.

And there’s his name.

“Sam!”

Every night. Every day. Always, over and over and over again, Riley’s voice or Maria Hill’s or Maddy’s or even Steve’s, all the people he couldn’t save, couldn’t keep from bullets and fire and blood.

He covers his ears.

“Sam!”

Maddy. Maddy, Maddy, Maddy filling his ears and his lungs and his eyes and helping him hear, breathe, see and Sam can’t possibly sleep with this, with this familiar voice that forgives him so easily, that loves him and caresses his broken, black heart in its hands.

He covers his head with a pillow.

“Sam!”

But then maybe it’s real. Because his eyes may be red with rage and his mouth purple with cold and his world grey with loss but he’s never heard color like this before - yellow, yellow, so yellow.

There’s a miracle standing in his yard. His miracle.

Finally.

Maddy smiles up at him, and Sam shouts down from the window, “I missed you!”

He’s grinning. Maddy laughs; it sounds like fairies’ voices, like bells.

“I missed you too!”

Thunder rumbles and down rains the storm, but Sam’s standing in the eye of the hurricane, his arms around his love.

(He’s been waiting his whole life to understand safe.)

__

_ yes, i think I am finally clean. _ _ _

 

**63.**

_ I thought how could I let you fall by yourself while I’m wasted with someone else? if we go down then we go down together. _

__

He wouldn’t blame her if she’s moved on. He’s been gone, what, five months? Maybe longer. Time’s not even real here, it’s just blank and endless and filled with sleeping, fallen heroes.

If this is what dying is like, Peter wants no part in it.

He can hear her, you know. Calling his phone and leaving him messages. Asking him why, where, how can she join him. Who did this. Praying for his return, for it all to be a dream. Slamming car doors and breaking windows, being a nightmare to her parents, whispering his name to an empty grave. Placing flowers down.

Saying - no, trying to say goodbye.

_ Hello, _ he wants to tell her.  _ I’m here. I’m just waiting. Be patient with me, I promise I’ll be there tomorrow. Someday. Soon. Almost. _

It’s all a lie, well-articulated bullshit, and he knows it. But he tries to reach her anyway, to assure her that he’s not dead, not yet.

But she’s Merida Romanova. If there’s anything she’s bad at, and he’s not sure there is anything, it’s listening. She can’t be bothered to, can’t risk it, has too much noise inside her own head to bear to try and listen to somebody else about themselves. He was the exception.

God, her smile. Her eyes, her voice, her touch; she could make the rain turn to sunshine with nothing but a giggle, one at a joke of his as he slung an arm around her shoulder and kissed her beanie barely holding in her wild curls and whispered in her ear that, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” “I don’t know.” “Me neither.”

Stupid,  _ stupid _ stuff that they wasted their breath in saying, but it made them happy, and his aunt was always saying that that was the only thing that really mattered. To this day, stuck in this hellhole of blank white and grey and black, he’s not sure if he disagrees.

“Stay,” she used to mumble, into his bloodied chest that she’d bandage and rid of his torn uniform, and he’d squeeze her fingers and tell her he couldn’t, he had to get home. It was true, he couldn’t ever stay out much later than whatever time it was then or his aunt would go crazy worrying about him, but a lot of the time he wanted to stay, even if…

Nevermind. He should’ve, and he knows it, and he can’t resurrect himself and correct it now, now can he?

No matter how badly he wants to.

And he looks down at his hands, the ones that fit perfectly with hers, and he sees it.

They’re crumbling.

Right into blackened piles of ash and dust, just like how he died, and he starts to panic, screaming, slipping to his knees because it’s something he knows he can’t outrun and he can’t feel anything but his heart painfully stitching itself back together and he closes his eyes because he doesn’t want to see what’s coming next; he’s been trapped in blank white for five months, he doesn’t want to spend the same chip of eternity in black.

“Peter?”

He clenches his fists - wait, he thought he didn’t have any hands - and sets his jaw. He won’t look, he won’t; it’s not her, it’s not, it’s just some random illusion there to trick him into breaking all over again; well, he won’t. He refuses to. Not this time, anyway.

But the hallucinations have never been able to touch him.

“Peter. Look at me.”

He pops one eye open.

Then the other, because she’s there, she’s right there, smiling with those glistening eyes and laughing and her hair’s unbrushed and her face dirty and she’s wearing his sweatshirt and dirty socks and underwear and nothing else and there’s spinach in her teeth but he doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything as beautiful.

He reaches out and puts his hands on her waist, picks her up, spins around; her laugh is musical, melodious, spectacular and he puts her back down only to have her jump right back into his arms, wrapping her own around his neck and burying her face in his shoulder. He strokes her hair, nuzzling against her, and he hears her clearly this time, not blurry like he’s in a dream -

“You’re home, Peter,” Merida rasps. “You’re home, you came home to me,” and his grieving is over.

(Granted, they’ll be dead again in decades, but until then, life is orange like the sunset.)

__

_ getting drunk on the past we were living in. _ _ _

 

**64.**

_ tired of being played like a violin. what have I gotta do to get inside that pretty little mind? _

__

From the very beginning, he can see red. Ribbons and gems and strings, and he sees her. He sees her angry eyes, the blood she’s shed, the blood she’s lost and the blood she’s taken. There’s too much of it dancing between her fingers now, captured and held by the magic she’s wielding, and he’s perfectly aware that she doesn’t quite know how to control it, doesn’t quite see the beauty in it, doesn’t quite understand why all those who see her are afraid.

“I looked into your head,” she tells him. “And I saw annihilation.” And there is a burning hatred in her voice, a decision made to follow fury, and he simply touches the tip of his index finger to her forehead.

“And here,” he murmurs, “I see rebirth.”

She’s taken aback, he can tell, but that’s not his concern, his problem, his purpose; instead, he quotes a prophecy, “Life is not all we dreamed it to be.”

He’s not quite sure where he heard it, where he learned it, but he remembers its message, its words clear as day, as if they are the oxygen he breathes, and then there are her eyes.

Wide, frightened,  _ red _ and he brushes his lips against her forehead, pressing his palms into hers; he closes his own eyes and tells her, “Shhh…” because her breathing is fast and frantic and her thoughts are weaving in and out of constant streams of worry and panic.

“You are safe,” he whispers, and her ear is against his chest, listening for the heartbeat that he’s always known was never real, never really there, never anything but an illusion.

“I…” She starts, then swallows and reconsiders and starts again. “What do you want?”

They will always ask that question, humans - so generous, so willing to serve, it’s a flaw in their humanity; but their arrogance, their selfishness, it will always win over in the end, and he can see what the others are thinking and it is never entirely selfless, no matter how much they may think it so.

The good captain, for example - he burns down the world for his best friend, calls it heroics; he is a lost soul looking for his kindred spirit in the only one left who’s like him.

And the monster. Willing to become the very alter-ego he hates more than anyone, anything else for his friends, and yet he can only be worried for the inventor’s safety, come down to it.

And her.

The shivering girl in his arms now, so angry for her brother, at Stark, at Ultron, at the world, at  _ him _ but he knows he can do nothing for her but soothe her pain; she knows he would make the trade in an instant, her brother’s life for hers, but it would only be half because she wants him to live - her death has always been her favorite pastime.

“Not yet, Wanda,” he assures, so softly. “I promise you, someday, but not yet.”

She doesn’t know what he means, cannot comprehend it with her young and innocent mind, but he does not mind.

“What do they call you?” She asks, and he sees the red of her heart through her transparent skin and whispers, “Vision.”

(Blood, blood, there will be so much more of it but at least she can finally  _ see _ .)

__

_ must be love on the brain, that’s got me feeling this way. it beats me black and blue but it does me so good and I can’t get enough. _ _ _

 

**65.**

_ cry and curse at the wind. he broke his own heart and I watched as he tried to reassemble it. _

__

It seems only yesterday they were fighting over this throne. The one Thor sits on so regally, and Loki stands next to him now, grinning, but not mischievously - simply, happy. It has been far too long since Thor has seen that expression on his brother’s face.

So far they’ve come from their backyard fights.

“Are you satisfied, brother?” He asks now, voice rough and gravelly, but soft and gentle, and Loki closes his eyes; he feels Thor thread their fingers together and smiles.

“I am… content, you could say,” Loki finally answers. “It seems I have not won the throne, but, at least, someone worthy sits upon it now.”

And Thor stands then, turns to face his brother, takes his pale hands in his own. Loki’s glamour slips the tiniest bit, and for a brief moment, Thor can see his brother for what he really is, for who he is. The cold burns his hands, but he has never seen anything so beautiful, no matter that it’s just a flicker.

Loki’s face contorts into an amused expression at his brother’s openness, his touch, but Thor is not fooled; he can see past the mask to glimpse the sadness and anxiousness is his eyes.

“I would have gladly given up that throne,” he says softly, “if only to have won your love.”

Loki smiles. It’s teasing, because he has always made fun of Thor’s sappiness, but the blonde can tell he appreciates the sentiment right now.

“And I too have won yours,” Loki whispers, “if not also Father’s approval.”

Thor pulls his brother into his arms, then, and presses a kiss to his ear, “You could have won that if you were anyone but yourself, Loki, and even then, it would have been impossible.”

Loki blushes and pushes Thor away, “You won him over.”

But the blonde just pulls him right back to his side with a tug on his wrist, and Loki laughs as he finds himself spun across the floor only to crash into his brother’s chest, “My gods, you’re so dramatic.”

“I am nothing of the sort, dear brother,” Thor murmurs, eyes twinkling, never moving from Loki’s face. “And I was never able to win him over, but now, I have won something much more precious.”

“And what is that?” Loki whispers, breathing slow and controlled despite his fastly beating heart beneath Thor’s palm; Thor smiles and kisses his brother’s lips, just like they used to do before this whole mess started, and hopefully from now until forever.

“You,” Thor whispers, and Loki, for once, stays curled warm and safe in Thor’s arms, mumbling a promise against the thunder god’s chest, forgetting to be prideful.

“And you have won me.”

(Thor used to think Loki wanted gold. Mountains of it, riches untold like the ones already kept in their dungeons with the prisoners, Loki one of them, but now, with Loki’s promise in mind, Thor knows Loki wanted something far more valuable and much harder to steal - his heart.)

__

_ that was the day that I promised I’d never sing of love, since it does not exist. but darling, you are the only exception. _ _ _

 

**66.**

_ she’s imperfect, but she tries. she is good, but she lies. she is broken. _

__

They were never meant for love. Neither of them.

And yet here they are, her head on his chest as they read the  _ New York Times _ in bed together, steaming cups of tea next to them on their bedside tables, rings glistening on their fingers, and Clint cannot even begin to wonder how they got themselves here.

“I can hear you thinking,” Natasha whispers, touches his cheek and pecks his lips, those calculating eyes boring into him, and he smiles, though it’s distracted.

“Maybe.”

“Hey,” she says, “look at me. What’s wrong?”

And he does, he looks at her, and like all other times forgets entirely about the outside world, because suddenly there’s nothing but her piercing green eyes and bright red hair, as wild as their daughter’s, asleep in the next room.

And he smiles. “Absolutely nothing.”

(And all those years ago, when he was sent to kill her, he remembers thinking that she looked like a victim.

He remembers thinking that when he married her - a short signing of a paper at the city hall so he couldn’t be taken from her by S.H.I.E.L.D.’s biases - tangled hair, bags under her eyes, wrinkled clothes that were half his and sluggish, she looked like a bride.

He remembers thinking that when they threatened her with words whirled like whips he stepped in front of her and saw her smirk which gave him strength and she looked like a queen.

Now, he remembers knowing that she is the only one meant for him, and that she looks like a person, one with skin just like his, littered purple with bruises.)

__

_ she is gone, but she used to be mine. _ _ _

 

**67.**

_ my heart’s against your chest, lips pressed to my neck, i’m falling for your eyes, but they don’t know me yet. _

__

Jaime would never take anything he had for granted; it was ingrained into him by having no mother and no father for most of his life, until Tony came and took him… home, I guess.

Hesitant for a long time, is really how you could describe him back then, but then there was Pietro and his beating heart and his hair silver like the snow that used to imprison Jaime, surrounded by cold stones.

But now, he is warm.

He’s fifteen now, and it’s been so long since he was born, some fifty, sixty years at this point but it makes no difference to him and now it’s his birthday again, the flakes raining down outside and Pietro asleep with his head on Jaime’s lap, the brunette boy’s bony fingers combing through Pietro’s hair.

“Been so long,” he whispers to himself, “so long.”

Sometimes he thinks of his mom. Of Howard - that’s what Tony calls their father - but then he thinks of where he is now, and he won’t take it for granted, because he knows that even if they didn’t live this sort of life they chose, tomorrow is never promised.

And here comes proof of his existence now, the one he loves most in the world, “Lolina, come here, babydoll.”

His little sister crawls up onto the couch, and he wraps an arm around her, letting her press her ear to his chest, to check his heartbeat. He does the same to her, and sometimes, they sneak into their parents’ bedroom and do the same for Steve and Bucky. It’s never easy, but it makes life some slight percent more bearable. Helps them breathe to know the others are, I guess.

Maria mumbles, “He’s gone.” So soft, so vulnerable, and Jaime kisses her forehead.

“I know. We’re safe.”

Nine weeks since Thanos left, and still, most of them find themselves shattered, unable to fix each other, everyone’s ashes too scrambled and stirred to be distinguishable anymore. But no matter, because with all their ashes, they can light a fire to guide themselves through the dark, and like always, that’ll have to be enough.

“I love you, you know that?” He whispers, to both of the bodies whose warmth comfort him now, and Maria nods; Pietro curls his fingers into a fist around Jaime’s plaid pajama pant leg.

“Love you,” Maria answers, and Pietro may be asleep, but those trembling fingers are answer enough.

Jaime lets his head fall back against the couch and closes his eyes, rubs his fingers gently up and down Maria’s arm, hears her snoring and sniffling softly, and smiles smally to himself.

“Safe,” he murmurs. “We’re safe.”

(Outside, the flurry becomes a blizzard, and soon they are the only ones safe, the rest of the world drowning in frigid, shining silver.)

__

_ kiss me like you wanna be loved. _ _ _

 

**68.**

_ you’re my best friend, and you knew what it was. he is in love. _

__

It’s a quiet night. Too quiet for peace, not silent enough for fear. Simply, just right for comfort.

She’s next to him now, hair waving ever-so-slightly with the wind, their pinkies touching but nothing else. Even this amount of contact is practically intimate for them, as they are not married yet, will never be married, and he is a prince, he cannot have affairs. The world could not care less for their love.

“It’s beautiful out,” she finally says, husky with fatigue and foreign sickness, and he doesn’t answer. The quiet should not be broken, it is the first lesson he learned.

Too long, it seems, he’s been silent under her gaze, and so she tries again, “It really is, T’Challa,” but he only allows the faintest smile to cross his face.

He hums. It’s vaguely interested, but not too much so, and she chuckles, ducks her head to hide the grin behind her hair. And she’s so beautiful in this light, blush spreading across her cheeks, almost as beautiful as the night that surrounds them

And he makes a split-second decision.

Small, tiny, no effect on the universe, barely a movement, but still a decision, and every single one can have an impact, however insignificant.

He inches his pinky on top of hers, curls them together, drops their hands from the railing to swing between them and finally, come to a rest.

She does nothing.

Simply squeezes his pinky gently with hers, and  _ this _ , this huge expansion of space between them, connected only by a measly thread of discolored string, this is love.

(The sky is black, endless like this moment, longing for something to break its vast existence with a spot of color, with no hope of starlight, but he thinks he can glimpse some in her eyes.)

__

_ no proof, one touch, but you felt enough. _ _ _

 

**69.**

_ I could make you happy, make your dreams come true. no, there’s nothing that I wouldn’t do. go to the ends of this earth for you. _

__

It doesn’t take too long for her to find them.

Honestly, it’s not even that hard. Just a few hacks into Sam’s phone when he’s not looking, a quick call to T’Challa - they’re friends. Long story. Not one for right now - and Natasha Romanoff is standing in the middle of a living room; one, it seems, the family has made theirs.

She expected to find Bucky. Maybe frozen, like last time Steve called her (at least a year ago), or sleeping in a bed and curled in Steve’s arms.

She thought she’d find Maria, that goddamn little girl who caused that whole fucking war with Tony back in 2016, when petty biting remarks and arguments over leadership mattered.

She knew she’d find Steve, probably lovesick over Barnes and fidgeting with the white gold band on his left hand, like he always does when he’s nervous, maybe in a hospital waiting room or out in the shade of a tree while the grass sways around him and tickles his palms.

But she never expected to find them all together, let alone with a new edition.

Bucky’s on the couch, an arm around Maria while they read a book together; Steve’s cooking something in the kitchen while singing jazzy love songs from the 40’s under his breath; the new one, the teenage boy, is dancing as gracefully as she used to, ballerina-like, while humming his own music under his breath.

He smiles when he sees her. “Dad. Papa.”

That’s when Steve and Bucky look up and meet her eyes. Maria, too, and Bucky’s grip immediately tightens around her protectively. Natasha smiles.

“Never could stay out of trouble, could you, Rogers?” She says, soft and teasing. “Especially not when it involved Barnes.”

And there it is, their whole lives, worded carefully in a simple sentence, and Steve just smiles, crinkles by the corners of his eyes.

“No, not really.”

She quirks one corner of her mouth up, to make a smile, and walks forward towards the boy in the corner. Passes by Bucky and ruffles his hair, kisses Maria’s cheek, and finally, stops in front of the danseur. He grins, all teeth, and he looks like Tony and Maria and he only has one real leg.

But she can see he’s happy. She can tell they all are.

“I’m Natasha,” she holds out a hand for him to shake, “nice to meet you.”

His smile brightens; he shakes her hand.

“Jaime Carter, miss,” he answers, voice clear and rough. “Pleasure’s all mine.”

She glances out of the corner of her eye at Steve and Bucky, and Jaime’s little sister, if she’s reading this correctly. Then Maria smiles, giggles, and jumps out of her father’s arms to run over to her aunt, grabbing the latter’s hand; Natasha turns back to Jaime with a smile.

“I can teach you more, if you like,” she nods to his ballet shoes, and Jaime takes her other hand, smiling down at his little sister as she laughs.

“I’d like, Auntie,” and she sends a smile over her shoulder at her niece and nephew’s parents before disappearing outside with them.

(Steve crosses the room to sit on the armrest of the couch, subconsciously reaching out to take Bucky’s hand.

“They’ll be alright, won’t they?” He asks, quiet. “We’ll be?”

Bucky looks up at his husband, the one he’s been following for a century, and whispers, “Til the end a the line, Stevie,” and at Steve’s lips parting slightly in a gasp, Bucky pulls the captain down on top of him with a smile, pressing their mouths together.

“I love you.”

Steve doesn’t feel the need to answer - they both know the answer.

From outside, Natasha looks in through the window, unbeknownst to the couple. She smiles, fidgets with her own wedding ring. She’s glad those two idiots found each other.

It may not have taken her long to get here, but it’s taken far too long for those soldiers to stop looking past the blue of one another’s eyes; their smiles are the rainbows she wishes could light their lives a flat path.)

__

_ I would hold you for a million years to make you feel my love. _ _ _

 

**70.**

_ seal my heart and break my pride. I’ve nowhere to stand and now nowhere to hide. align my heart, my body, my mind to face what I’ve done and do my time. _

__

At this point, they hardly even notice the stares.

Sure, they’re scaring a MacDonald’s employee shitless with their appearance - fritzing armor, torn suits, one of them in no shirt and barefoot, hair tangled, faces dirty, still looking a little green on the edges and dried blood trailing from the sides of their mouths, with a little girl in tow.

But at the moment, none of them really care.

So they pay for their burgers and fries and go sit down in a booth in the corner while the petrified employee races to hang the CLOSED sign over the door and then scrambles to get them their food.

“Thanks,” Steve manages through his sparse bouts of breathing, and he coughs up some ash after the word is spoken so it’s really not reassuring, even with his grateful smile, and the employee just nods frantically with wide eyes and rushes to leave the restaurant.

Steve sighs.

He looks up when Bucky’s hand touches his back, their daughter scrunched in between them and sleeping soundly, using Steve’s leg as a pillow; Steve offers a weak smile. “‘M alright.”

Bucky’s brow is creased in worry, but he smiles back, mouths, “Okay. Love you.” Steve grins, mouths the same words back at his husband. Their daughter lets out a quiet snore, interrupting the moment, and they both blush and look up at their friends, only to find that nobody’s watching them. (That’s a first.)

Jaime’s caught up in a conversation with Pietro, the silver-haired boy’s arms snaked around the brunette’s waist and they’re looking at each other with eyes twinkling behind black bags and it’s almost like there’s nobody else in the world but the two of them, all tangled up in one another.

Thor and Loki, slumped into each other’s side while they eat - Thor stuffs burgers into his mouth whilst his brother chews slowly and calmly, tiredly as if his jaw is creaking and needs to be oiled - and Loki whispers something in Thor’s ear and Thor looks down at him and kisses his forehead. Whispers something back.

Wanda’s fingers are tangled with Vision’s as she chomps on fries smothered in ketchup, not bothering to look his way even as he stares at her, but he cocks his head suddenly and she wrinkles her nose and goddammit, they’re doing that telepathic conversation thingy again, aren’t they?

Sam’s holding his sloppy, grease-dripping burger in one hand while his other arm is wrapped tightly around Maddy, whose wings are tucked behind him as he stares straight off into space though there’s nothing to stare at but the wall. They’re both completely silent, like Wanda and Vision, only then Sam mutters something about Chewbacca and Maddy lets out a breathless chuckle and they look alive again, if only for a moment.

T’Challa’s huddled with Sharon at the far end of the table, grinning against her ear as he murmurs in it, and she cackles at whatever he’s saying and buries her face in his neck, kisses the skin there, and a blush rises up the king’s throat to reach his cheeks, where it stands its ground.

Bruce is mumbling to Tony, who’s shoving French fries in his mouth at a rather rude rate, but nonetheless, he’s eating, and that’s more than he’s done in five days and six hours, twenty-one minutes if Bruce’s stopwatch is correct and he pulls Tony’s arm down by the wrist right as the next handful of fries touch his lips and hums, “No,” and then cups Tony’s face in his hands, kissing the man on both eyelids as they flutter shut and whispers, “Sleep,” and Tony collapses against him; a snore, a sniffle, here and there.

Natasha and Clint are both asleep, cheeks pressed against the dirty back of the bench as their breaths blow hair out of Natasha’s face and their hands lay limp in between them, fingers tangled together. It’s probably the most peaceful rest they’ve gotten in years; next to them, Merida talks animatedly to Peter, who just nods at all the right moments until he just keeps nodding and his forehead bumps against her shoulder as he slumps forward, fast asleep. Merida smiles and touches his face, lifting his head the tiniest bit so she can kiss his hair, “Sweet dreams, my darlin’.”

And now, Bucky and Steve, their daughter in between them and their son on their right, their family close together and eating and sleeping almost like they’re normal, and so the two soldiers look at one another at the same time.

They shrug, lean over their daughter to share a kiss, and promptly let their heads fall to the table as their eyes close with exhaustion and relief.

This is enough. They are satisfied, for now.

(When they wake up, there’ll be a blank white canvas for them to start writing on. Living on. Being on.

If only, like stories, all their lives could’ve been dreams.)

__

_ cause most of our feelings they are dead and they are gone. then love showed its teeth like it’s something vicious. _ _ _

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> all song lyrics you can copy and paste the lyrics to search for them because I used 74 of them and I don't think there's space to list them all so
> 
> thank you so much for reading i'm super proud of this and i hope you enjoyed! sorry about all the angst


End file.
